Fanny and Stella- A Victorian Scandal

I finally got round to reading Neil McKenna’s “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men who Shocked Victorian England”- somewhat belatedly, I admit (it’s not easy to keep on top of a bad book habit in four languages).   This deals with a Victorian transvestite cause celebre.     In April 1870, Ernest Bolton (known to his many friends and admirers as Stella) and Frederick Park (Fanny) were arrested leaving the Strand Theatre (a notorious pick-up venue) after an uproarious night of drinking and attention-seeking behaviour in the box they were occupying with two young men.  Both were in full on Victorian female finery (Stella's on the left above, in a photo taken when they were doing some theatre work in Essex).   Over a year later the couple, accompanied by two male associates (with others charged in absentia) were tried on rather convoluted charges relating to conspiracy to commit sodomy.   After a six day trial all defendants were acquitted.  In the intervening year the investigation had seen both key defendants subjected to grossly intrusive and humiliating medical inspections to determine whether they bore on their bodies the traces of regular participation in anal intercourse, the impounding of large amounts of female clothing, photographs and correspondence stored in rented accommodation and the mobilisation of police forces as far away as the depths of rural Scotland in search of suspects.  The case had international ramifications- one of the accused in the Old Bailey dock was the US Consul General in Edinburgh.   It was also marked by the mysterious, possibly faked, death of a duke’s son and former MP.  The press lapped the whole affair up; broadside ballads and other ephemera were published to feed public interest.

McKenna’s account (written in a sometimes florid, even rather camp, style) sweeps the reader through the whole tangled tale.   He refers to the two stars of the show by their chosen female names throughout- and the choice of gender identifiers gets a bit confusing at times, though that also reflects the confusion of contemporary observers.   The case threw a spotlight on a lively and at times remarkably visible cross dressing scene in mid Victorian London.   This covered a very broad spectrum of activity.   At one end there was a world of more-or-less respectable and at times very public theatrical performances.  Stella, blessed with a very fine singing voice and radiant good looks, had star status, garnering positive reviews in regional newspapers for her stage appearances (her season in Scarborough with Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, the duke’s son mentioned above and her intermittent off-stage husband, brought the house down).  Fanny, less overtly pretty and requiring rather more aid from corsetry and the make up case to look her best, specialised in older feminine roles.   Somewhere below this lurked a world of quasi-private drag balls with suitable retiring rooms for ladies to fix their make up- or get up to more carnal pleasures- and rented rooms for part time ladies to store their clothes (Victorian frocks and underwear must have taken up an awful lot of space…) and entertain friends.

At the other end of the scale lay overt prostitution.  This sometimes overlapped with an active sub-culture of male prostitution, sometimes competed with the female variety (Stella first came to the notice of the police when she and another friend from the theatrical world were attacked by a group of female prostitutes who saw them as unfair competition).  McKenna is in no doubt that both his heroines engaged in remunerated sexual activity- and that their clients might not always have been aware that the lady of the night whose services they had procured was not quite what she seemed.  It was a world in which prostitutes very rarely ever stripped naked to service a client and where anal intercourse, though frowned on as an import from France, was nevertheless a common enough request even from straight male clients.  

McKenna has intriguing things to say about the practicalities of Victorian drag.  Stella, Fanny and their friends were beneficiaries of the then-new world of mail order shopping which made it much easier to acquire cosmetics or items of clothing without necessarily having to go into a shop (though nascent department stores also helped to make shopping a more anonymous process than in the days when a lady would have had to be measured up individually for a new dress).   He doesn’t mention shoes, which I suspect might have been much more of an issue than frocks (at a pinch girls could run up their own dresses on the new-fangled sewing machine even if dress patterns look surprisingly expensive on McKenna’s figures; producing your own shoes would have been a lot harder). It may have been an advantage that fashionable female hairdos in the late 1860’s were heavy on artificial hair extensions, meaning that suitable braids and the like were readily available and no lady’s hair looked entirely natural.  The downside was that hairdos took a lot of assembly.  A girl wanting to go out for a night on the town would generally acquire assistance in getting ready (this was an era when servants were to be found a remarkably long way down the social scale), though it’s gratifying to find that girls generally helped each other out in this area.   There were other problematic areas. Clothes took a lot of upkeep in a world without effective washing machines and there are some suggestions that Stella and Fanny’s outfits looked far more impressive in gaslight than in the cold light of day. Unwanted hair was obviously a problem too; electrolysis lay decades in the future and plucking only got you so far in any reasonable time frame.   Corsetry helped a good deal in attaining a suitably shapely figure but might need supplementing; McKenna mentions rather gruesome-sounding breasts made out of animal innards (I can’t see those ever coming back into fashion even amongst the most organically minded contemporary t-girl) though Stella and Fanny seem to have used lots and lots of padding to judge from what the police took into custody.

And dabbling in prostitution had its own hazards in a pre-antibiotic age- Fanny eventually died young as a result of inadequately treated syphilis.

The book is a thoroughly engaging read and McKenna’s sympathy for his heroines is clear (especially Fanny, who does come across as the nicer of the two, much less high maintenance and demanding than her adoptive sister Stella even if she did slide into Lord Arthur’s bed when he wearied of Stella’s naggings- though I feel McKenna is a bit unfair to her about her looks- she looks pretty sexy and desirable in the photo below) 

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It does have some shortcomings.   Some of his literary references are a bit shaky (Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind is not a factory owner).  The precise order of events is sometimes rather hard to work out.   McKenna is also inclined to present what must surely be his own speculations on his characters’ subjectivities as fact (neither Stella nor Fanny wrote their memoirs, after all, and we can only guess at how they saw themselves).  When it suits his story he sometimes takes at face value evidence from individuals whose credibility was trashed by the defence in the Old Bailey trial.  

He also under-examines some of the mysteries surrounding the case- not least why it was brought in the first place.   As McKenna points out, it was not all that rare for Central London magistrates to find themselves sitting in judgement on men who’d been pulled in by the police while out on the streets in drag.   They normally got off with a modest fine for breach of the peace and a slapped wrist.   Fanny and Stella, it rapidly emerged, had been under surveillance for days if not weeks before they were arrested by a team of detectives in the Strand Theatre. They were clearly an above averagely noisy and visible pair but why the special treatment?  Some murky documentation (which the defence exploited to the maximum in the main trial) hinted at conspiracies.   Something unusual was going on here but McKenna never really elucidates what might have spurred the police into quite such elaborate activity (did E Division of the Metropolitan Police have nothing more urgent on its casebooks?).   My suspicion would be that Stella hooking up with Lord Arthur may have been part of the issue.   He was clearly a monumental embarrassment- godson of the Prime Minister Mr Gladstone, briefly MP for Newark (a constituency which doesn’t seem to have much luck with its MPs….), bankrupt and deep in debt (McKenna suggests that Stella was selling her body to keep them financially afloat as a couple) and thoroughly indiscreet about his sexual preferences.   But surely it would have been simpler to bundle him out of the country on a remittance rather than risk a prosecution in which his name was bound to appear prominently (which, if you take the view that his death was faked, is what happened anyway but only after the damage had been done; my guess is that the suspicious aspects of his death were a cover for suicide, a possibility that McKenna doesn’t discuss)?

Similar questions surround the Old Bailey trial.   On the face of it, this saw the full might of the state on display; the Attorney General led for the prosecution, the Lord Chief Justice presided.  As McKenna says, however, at times the prosecution’s heart didn’t seem to be in it.   The Attorney General more or less admitted in his opening speech that the case had been pursued to court at the insistence of the Home Secretary (and by implication against the advice of the Law Officers).   The police had cut no end of corners in assembling their case, searching properties and impounding private property without a warrant. The prosecution witnesses were either deeply unimpressive (a former policemen thrown off the force for misconduct, a rather ineffectual theatre manager) or had shifted their ground in the period since the committal hearings- almost invariably in ways which favoured the accused (McKenna hints they’d been got at by the defence).   Neither Fanny nor Stella took the stand- they were under no legal obligation to- but Stella’s mother was allowed to give a bravura performance in support of her offspring which left hardly a dry eye in the house.  She was never seriously pressed on her convenient memory lapses and the inconsistencies which riddled her account.  Mr Boulton was conveniently out of the country on business. 

It is of course possible that the Attorney General, Sir Robert Collier, was simply a rather poor courtroom performer who managed a problematic case badly.  He wasn’t one of the stars of the Victorian bar, his legal career prior to his appointment had been solid rather than stellar and he would have got the job as much for political services as for legal expertise.    In fairness it was never going to be easy to prove the (rather convoluted) charges.   It was notoriously difficult to make consensual sodomy charges stick unless the parties were either caught in flagrante or one of them was persuaded (or induced) to turn evidence.   This wasn’t going to happen here- which was why the stated charges majored on conspiracy rather than the actual commission of an offence even though this led to some logical absurdities worthy of WS Gilbert. 

Even conspiracy was hard to prove.  Stella and Fanny may have been flamboyant but they were not utterly reckless; they had gone out of their way to inform the rather besotted young man in the box with them at the Strand Theatre of their true gender more than once and he simply didn’t believe them- he was effectively a defence witness when called.  He wasn’t alone; even when they were in male dress they were often taken for women posing as men, to the extent that some contemporary commentators hinted that they might, in today’s parlance, be intersex- a factor further muddying the already murky waters.  For all its horrors, the medical examinations they had been subjected to worked doubly in their favour; firstly as the medical luminaries involved voted five to one that there was no physical evidence of anal sex to be seen on their bodies and secondly because the whole business of examining them was of highly questionable legality and did the prosecution little good.    

Trying to bring sodomy-related charges before a jury in the 1870’s wasn’t quite as straightforward as Victorian stereotypes might imply.  As McKenna notes, there was a seamy side of blackmail and extortion to law enforcement in this area, where corrupt policemen worked hand in glove with male prostitutes to extort cash from men not to pursue fraudulent allegations of sexual assault.   Fanny’s brother Harry (though pretty obviously gay himself) had been the victim of entrapment of this sort and had skipped bail to avoid the courts- tragically he was the main victim of the case, tracked down thanks to his correspondence with Fanny and sentenced to hard labour which killed him.  When arrested, Stella’s first reaction was to offer to pay off the detective involved- whether with money, sexual favours or both is unclear.   The middle aged middle class males who would have made up the Old Bailey jury were no doubt well aware of this context.   They were also, to an extent that McKenna doesn’t entirely recognise, drawn from a social group which in the mid-Victorian age might not have liked “sodomites” but was also highly ambivalent about the assertion of state power to pry into areas of private life (especially the private lives of middle class individuals) and far less convinced of the unique wonderfulness of “our policemen” than their children and grandchildren would become.   They were likely to be every bit as worried about police encroachments on the liberty of the subject as by claims of sodomitical conspiracies.  

A competent defence team could make much of these concerns.  Fanny, Stella and their comrades in the dock were very well defended indeed- to an extent which leads one to wonder who was paying the costs.  It’s suggested that the leading solicitor who orchestrated the defence was acting out of a sense of sympathy for the underdog and that the £5000 plus which must have been involved (add a couple of zeros or more to get a sense of contemporary values) came from one of their friends- but she is later recorded as having died in poverty.  Maybe the drag scene took a whip round to raise the cash (sadly no advertisements for benefit events survive……); possibly some of the barristers (including the wonderfully named Mr Straight QC) took the case out of sympathy with Fanny’s father, a respected judge.    It’s an issue McKenna doesn’t really pursue, perhaps for lack of evidence- but a slightly frustrating gap.

All things considered, the real puzzle is why the Home Secretary insisted on going to trial on such a shaky case.   McKenna at his most florid implies that the prosecution was set up to fail in order to show that the nation was not as undermined by sodomy as some were suggesting.   Put in those terms, this sounds a bit far fetched and depends heavily on taking one of Collier’s rhetorical flourishes out of its wider context.   Bruce’s career doesn’t give many clues.   He was hardly one of the big beasts of the Victorian political jungle; this was the only Cabinet post he ever held as he gave up politics in the mid 1870’s to pursue his business interests.   The only piece of legislation associated with his name was a Licensing Act which made it a great deal harder to obtain a licence to sell alcoholic drinks and piled additional regulation on pubs and bars.  This might suggest a puritan streak- but was very much in line with Gladstonian Liberal attitudes so may not entirely reflect his personal views.  It is of course possible that the puritanism verging on sanctimony integral to Gladstonian Liberalism played a role at political level.  My guess, for what it’s worth, is a subtle variant on McKenna’s view- that Bruce pressed for a trial because simply dropping the case after the initial committal hearing would have been grist to the mill of those in the media dropping dark hints of wide ranging sodomitical conspiracies in high places involving the political and social elites.   Going to trial, even accepting that the case was likely to fail, would at least choke off the wilder allegations of cover ups and conspiracies by allowing justice to be seen to be done.   It may be relevant that the press coverage quoted most by McKenna came from the 1870’s equivalent of the tabloids (the radical, quasi-republican “Reynolds News”, always looking for a stick to beat the aristocracy with, the scandal- oriented “Pall Mall Gazette” etc).  What else was in the papers at the time?   Presumably the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune got some coverage in the period between the original arrest and the trial- what were the major domestic news stories that Fanny and Stella were competing with for headline room?   McKenna doesn’t tell us.  I suspect their case didn’t quite monopolise press coverage for months on end in the way he implies, for all the Victorian love of a meaty courtroom drama.

McKenna does try to follow his characters beyond the trial, though in some cases this proves impossible.   The two stars had somewhat different fates, though both ended up in America.   Fanny, as noted above, died there a few years later of terminal syphilis.  Stella opted for a full time stage career working, ultimately with her brother as accompanist, in a kind of proto-revue act of songs and sketches- though under an assumed stage name as not every press revue was friendly when it came to light that she was the notorious Stella Boulton.  The photo of her in pastoral mode below dates from that period.  The act toured with reasonable success on both sides of the Atlantic until well into the 1890’s; she died in her fifties in 1903.  She never ended up in the courts again, nor does she seem to have located another long term partner, which is a little sad.   For all their over-the-top behaviour and her tantrums, she and Fanny seem to have been enjoyable, life-enhancing, people to know and to have inspired a considerable loyalty from their friends.   Despite its shortcomings McKenna’s book brings them very much back to life.

Shimmering robes and bound lambs

Finally emerging from hibernation again….  I’m afraid I go through spells where I find it very hard to work up enough enthusiasm to write things and I’ve been through one recently.   I should really have found lots to write about the exhibition of Viennese Secession portraits (actually covering a much wider time frame) at the National Gallery and the Royal Academy show of Daumier’s work which, for once, focused more on him as a painter than his better known graphic art satirising (mostly) safe subjects in the France of the July Monarchy and the Second Empire (his reputation as a fearless opponent of censorship is rather exaggerated; when it became clear that the authorities were going to play hard ball over press control he, and those he drew for, took the hint pretty quickly).   Maybe I’ll get round to writing about these eventually, taking a longer perspective….

What jolted me back into action was an exhibition in Brussels- for once the timing of my meetings meant that I was able to catch a late night opening.  This brought together paintings by Francesco de Zurbaran; fascinating in their own right but also forming an interesting compare and contrast exercise with the Murillo show at the Dulwich gallery last year.   The two men would presumably have known each other, though Murillo was some twenty years younger.  Both were active in Seville in the mid 17^th century, though Zurbaran was not a native of the city and moved around rather more, taking on commissions in Madrid and finally moving there for the final years of his life.  Both painted a great deal of devotional material for patrons in the local church establishment (Zurbaran seems to have been the go-to option for certain monastic orders, in particular the Mercedarians, an organisation dedicated to ransoming Christian captives from captivity in the North African emirates commonly known as the Barbary States).   Both enjoyed an enormous vogue in 18th and 19^th century Europe- reflected in the systematic looting of their work during the French occupation of Spain in the Napoleonic Wars.  Both rather fell out of favour as the 19^th century wore on- too much part of the religious culture of Counter-Reformation Spain and at the same time too sentimental for more modernist tastes which tended to prefer the more apparently “secular” Velasquez while valuing El Greco above the lot.  Both have however seen their reputations rise somewhat in more recent times.

Obviously there are major differences.   For one thing, Murillo seems to have been responsible for Zurbaran’s final relocation to Madrid, at least indirectly.  As I pointed out in my earlier piece about the Murillo show, Seville was a city under enormous strains by the late 1640’s.   Plague carved a swathe through the population; while the majority of those who died were the impoverished slum dwellers who figure in Murillo’s genre works, it carried off many of the better off as well, including Zurbaran’s son Juan (himself a rising artist specialising in still lives).   Patronage dried up as the economy tottered under the impact of war, high taxes and disease- and Murillo’s well-connected workshop increasingly cornered what market remained.   Zurbaran’s style also seems to have been going out of fashion by the late 1640’s; certainly when he relocated to Madrid his style shifted towards smaller, much more “conventional” paintings- and became a lot less distinctive, at least in my view.   It’s interesting that even before he moved north Zurbaran had become increasingly dependent on painting more or less speculative cycles of work aimed at the colonial market in the Americas- presumably a rather less sophisticated audience.

There are also obvious differences between the two artists in terms of content.   Though Zurbaran did a number of works which projected sacred events into contemporary interiors (various paintings of the child Jesus and his mother at home- images which imply that St Joseph was a carpenter with a very successful business indeed, able to afford the comfortable lifestyle of a prosperous senior guild master), he never went outside into the mean streets of Seville to create genre works.  His output was almost entirely religious- there is only one, rather unconvincing, secular portrait in the Brussels show and very few secular works of any kind.   It’s tempting to think that this may reflect something of the man’s personality and conclude that he was a much more overtly devout individual than Murillo.  He was certainly much less given to promotion though self-portraits.  No securely indentified self-portrait of Zurbaran survives and it’s revealing that the main candidate for that role is the work at the top of this piece, depicting St Luke contemplating the crucified Christ.  This is a strange piece in many ways, playing all sorts of games with depiction and reality.   The painter carries his palate, half way between a saintly attribute and the practical working tool of the jobbing artist sizing up his next commission, but there’s no easel or canvas in sight.   What is our role, as spectators to the encounter?  And where are we- at Calvary or in the imagination of the artist, inspired by the intensely visual devotional culture encouraged throughout Catholic Europe from at least the 15^th century?

The slightly strange lighting effects and the extreme attention paid to the fabric of Christ’s loincloth are typical of Zurbaran’s most distinctive work.    His love of deep light and shadow effects reflects the influence of Caravaggio even if Zurbaran’s reverent depiction of saints in ecstatic contemplation of the infinite is far removed indeed from the Italian painter’s habit of placing events from sacred history in the nether world of the taverns and slums of his own time.   The influence must have come indirectly; Zurbaran never left Spain in his life and I suspect he would have been as likely to see Flemish art of the so-called “School of Light”- also deeply influenced by Caravaggio- in Seville as any works by the man himself.  At times the lighting effects are so extreme that depictions of saints become almost abstract, as with St Francis below.   The saint’s face is so deeply shadowed by his hood that he’s scarcely identifiable as an individual at all, while the light flows round the fabric of his habit and reflects off the skull he is meditating upon.  This is perhaps an extreme example of its genre- other depictions of St Francis (including one in the National Gallery in London which has always been a bit of a personal favourite of mine) show a little more face and his later works are far less “radical” in their simplification of the composition- but none the less interesting.  Perhaps its very radicalism helps to explain why Zurbaran’s style began to fall out of favour even in his lifetime, forcing him to paint much more conventional pieces later- there’s a lovely (and maybe a bit too-good-to-be-true) story of a Zurbaran painting being discovered during the 19^th century in a convent attic to which it had been banished because the nuns found it too scary to hang in the church.

The fascination for the interplay of light and fabric, as well as an almost tactile enthusiasm for depicting the fall and folds of clothing, are also marks of Zurbaran’s style.   The dazzling white of the habit of the Mercedarian brother below illustrates this aspect nicely.   The colour is surely too good to be true in a world without  detergents or washing machines and reliant on natural fabrics (leaving aside the theological issue of whether a religious order vowed to personal poverty really ought to have been spending money and effort on keeping their habits gleaming white); no doubt the symbolism of purity is important here but one senses that Zurbaran’s love for depicting fabric goes some way beyond this.   

 The love for clothing and fabrics can be seen in the large format paintings of mostly rather obscure female saints which he produced for the colonial market like St Casilda below (for the record, St Casilda was, according to pious legend, the daughter of an 10^th century Moorish ruler of Toledo; she did good works, converted to Christianity and lived as a hermit to the age of nearly a hundred).   These saints are invariably sumptuously dressed young women dressed in Zurbaran’s fantasy of what the height of fashion in the remote past would have looked like.   In some ways they’re rather odd depictions, more like court ladies than holy women, and cast an interesting sidelight on how devout Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic imagined the court of Heaven.   

Perhaps the strangest works probably produced for the colonial market (though they don’t appear to have got there) are the set of paintings of Jacob and his twelve sons.   These ended up in Auckland Castle in north east England, purchased (apart from one which found its way to another stately home and had to be replaced with a copy) by the then bishop of Durham in the early 1750’s- supposedly as some kind of act of regret for the failure of Parliament to pass Jewish emancipation legislation.   They had a moment of celebrity in 2011 when the Church of England thought about selling them and they were purchased by a millionaire banker with roots in the region who then set up a trust to ensure their preservation in Auckland.   There seems to be a lot of uncertainty over their pre-Auckland history and they’re certainly not what you’d expect to find on the walls of an episcopal residence in northern England (though presumably the Old Testament subject matter made them acceptable in Protestant circles allergic to saintly ladies).    Four of the works made their way to Brussels; Asher can be seen below.   The commission allowed Zurbaran to give full rein to his fantasies; the figures are remarkably varied in look and clothing (the sense that each son is already the leader of a specific tribal grouping with very diverse looks and customs is quite strong), all set in a strange imagined classicising landscape.  

I have to admit that I found Zurbaran’s work very uneven in quality and degree of interest.   I’ve already mentioned that his later works don’t do it for me, and I’m afraid (as with Murillo) I can only look at a limited number of Immaculate Conceptions before my eyes glaze over (Zurbaran’s handling of this theme became increasingly formulaic over time anyway).  A lot of his more ambitious compositions look stiff and clunky and he was very hit and miss when it came to depicting people, particularly young women- his Virgins are all too often pudding faced and insipid and his angels rather too chocolate box for my taste.  Of course “Zurbaran”, in common with almost all 17^th century painters, was a workshop rather than a single artist and a substantial if unspecified part of many of his works would have been painted by assistants but (at least to my eye) he seems to have had more quality control problems than some.  Maybe he took on rather too many commissions, just possibly the process of scaling back optimistic 18^th/19^th century attributions has not gone far enough with his oeuvre.  Maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste and the lack of a shared religious faith; his depiction of the Lamb of God as a very literal young sheep bound and ready for slaughter, its special status marked by a faint halo, is undoubtedly very effective but strikes me as faintly creepy.   A devout Christian would perhaps see it rather differently.  

One area which got a bit of coverage in the Brussels show but where I’d have really liked more was Zurbaran’s qualities as a painter of still lives.  Unlike his son, who produced rather typically overblown baroque specimens of the genre, full of piles of over-ripe fruit and rather blatant allegories, his still lives tend to be very restrained.  Many of them concentrate on jars or other bits of humble household ware- the example below could almost be an ancestor of the works of Giorgio Morandi which I’ve written about before.     

How far these works were meant to be free-standing pieces is unclear; certain items and even complete compositions appear as minor parts of bigger works (as with the piece below) so perhaps they were preparatory sketches.   Whatever their status for Zurbaran, they’re wonderful little windows into the lived reality of 17^th century Spain.

Down by the Riverside

Finally getting going in 2014; I’m now beginning to accumulate a backlog of exhibitions to write about, which is not what was supposed to happen at all.  I seem to be suffering from a kind of writer’s block on getting down to the job- thanks, Tina, for prodding me into completing this entry….

At the head of the queue demanding my attention is the Dulwich Gallery’s show about James MacNeill Whistler and the role that the River Thames played in his art- this has closed in south London but it’s coming to Amherst, Massachusetts and the Smithsonian in Washington, if any of my transatlantic readers are interested.    This came labelled as “An American in London”, which struck me as a slightly debateable title given that I’m not sure just how “American” Whistler actually was by the time he created most of the art on display.   Admittedly he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts but he spent most of his childhood in Europe (particularly Russia) where his father was involved in railway engineering – which gives him an unexpected link to Giorgio de Chirico, also the son of a nomadic railway engineer.   In reality Whistler lived less than a decade of his life in the US.  He put in three mediocre years at West Point Military Academy before being thrown out for failing a chemistry test- the last straw which finally persuaded the college authorities that the US Army could well do without the young man’s services.   By a strange twist, one of his classmates was a certain Marcus Reno, later to play a controversial role in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  The two men had been friends at West Point and remained on letter writing terms for many years afterwards.   I can’t imagine Whistler ever ending up facing a court martial accused of excessive passivity in the face of the enemy; though; if he had ended up in the ranks of the Seventh Cavalry he’d probably have got his command wiped out by reckless over aggression (assuming his men didn’t shoot him first…).

After West Point, Whistler (still trading on his father’s connections as a military man?) spent a few months with the US Coastal Survey before leaving for France to pursue his art in 1855.   In 1859 he moved on to London (not least because he saw better chances of artistic recognition and sales prospects there).  Though he travelled widely thereafter, getting as far afield as Chile, and never gave up his foothold in France, he clearly came to regard the city as his home.  When forced into short term exile in Venice after going spectacularly bankrupt as a result of his ill-advised legal action against the critic John Ruskin (notoriously he won the verdict but the jury, which probably felt the case should never have gone to court, awarded him a farthing damages without costs), he felt homesick for London and came back as soon as he decently could.  He never seems to have thought of heading back to the USA to lick his wounds and wait for the dust to settle.   Above all, it seems revealing that, despite a West Point background which would more or less have guaranteed him commissioned rank, there is no suggestion that he ever considered crossing the Atlantic to fight (presumably for the Union) in the Civil War.   This suggests a rather detached view of his native land, to say the least. 

In other words, I don’t think Whistler’s art reflects a particularly “American” eye view of the River Thames; if anything, he came to be a London insider fairly rapidly, while on an artistic level the influence of 17^th century Dutch art, and later of Japanese prints, was far more relevant to his work than any American input.

The exhibition’s basic layout was a combination of chronological and geographical, reflecting the fact that Whistler’s depictions of the river tended to move upstream over time.  He started out in the bustling and at times rather dangerous world of the docks down east in Wapping and Rotherhithe, moved to the rapidly gentrifying environs of Chelsea in the 1860’s where he remained (albeit at a series of different addresses) for much of the rest of his life.   There were some rather awkward shifts in this approach- a series of lithographs from late in his career when he was staying in the Savoy Hotel with his terminally ill wife were slotted in the middle of the show rather out of chronological sequence - but the general structure more or less worked, especially as the geographical shifts correlated quite well with Whistler’s own changing style.

I hadn’t been aware that Whistler, in addition to his large scale works in oils, was such a prolific creator of engravings and other forms of graphic art.  He first made his name with a series of engravings of riverside scenes, mostly in and around the London docks, and throughout his artistic career sale of his graphic works brought in a fair share of his income.   The early engravings are wonderfully detailed and keenly observed (Whistler was an almost obsessive tinkerer with the plates until he got just the effects he wanted when the print was made).    They give a real sense of the vitality of the district- and the distinctly crumbling nature of many of the buildings backing on to the busy highway of the river.   This was a part of London which enjoyed a pretty lurid reputation as a place of crime and vice; there isn’t much explicit sign of that in the engravings, though it’s intriguing that one of them was drawn in the yard of the River Police station and it’s been suggested that the boatmen and dock workers who appear in the foreground of some of the views were in fact Whistler’s hired minders making sure that the well-dressed outsider wasn’t mugged as he took his preparatory sketches.  Whistler appears to have rather enjoyed the rough side of life in places like Wapping and the first painting to establish him as a rising star was also created in this period- see top.  Painted in a pub with a splendid view over the apparently chaotic hustle and bustle of the river, a woman enjoys a drink with a couple of men.   The female model is Jo Hiffernan/Heffernan (both spellings were used), Whistler’s Irish-born model and, living up to artistic stereotype, mistress.   The painting was originally supposed to cast her pretty unambiguously as a dockside prostitute with a client and her pimp; intriguingly Whistler reworked the painting to make her look a lot more “respectable” at the last minute before submission to the Royal Academy for hanging in the Summer Exhibition.   Perhaps he thought he might have trouble getting a work which was light on overt moralistic content past the Royal Academy jury as the “fallen woman” was not obviously on the way to appropriate punishment for her immorality. The result was a work which rather puzzled the critics, who couldn’t work out what the “story” it illustrated might be.    Jo also appeared in the exhibition, away from the river but carrying a Japanese fan and looking particularly lovely- see below.

In the 1860’s Whistler moved up river to Chelsea, which remained his London base for the rest of his life.  His redoubtable mother came for lengthy stays (Jo was packed off out of the way) and was rather put out by catching her son painting on the Sabbath in a grave departure from New England rectitude.  The river here was still a busy working highway, but not in quite the same way as in the East End docklands.   Barges and lighters plied the river as part of the transport networks linked to the docks for imports and exports, small steamers provided passenger transport to and from the City of London and watermen still ferried passengers up, down and across the river (in the 1860’s all the bridges apart from Westminster Bridge were subject to quite steep tolls even for pedestrian traffic and the public transport network was in its infancy).   Chelsea was a place in flux.  It had been a village out to the west of Westminster, popular in the 16^th and 17^th centuries with those well enough off to own their own barges to ferry them to the royal palace at Whitehall or all the way to the City.   Shifts in favoured royal residences away from the riverside and London’s inexorable creep westwards in the 17^th and 18^th centuries had meant that the wealthy moved elsewhere, leaving a lot of crumbling old buildings, near-slums and small industrial properties.   Its even more down market counterpart on the south bank of the Thames, Battersea, was also full of industry- and the last survivor of the grand commercial pleasure gardens which had dominated the area in the 18^th century.  Cremorne Gardens, however, had a pretty louche reputation.  By the mid-19^th century however, Chelsea was on its way back up again as it became fashionable with artists and writers, partly due to grand scale urban and riverside redevelopment (of which more later).   Perhaps the general loucheness and bohemian air imparted by Cremorne and the old riverside pubs helped too.

Whistler obviously relished the area.  His painting style slowly shifted away from the very detailed depictions in his early works to something much more loose and proto-impressionistic, with hazy washes of colour conveying a strong sense of atmosphere and steadily blurring the factories and boatyards of the riverside into a more generic shimmer.  It was during this period that he developed his mature style, with titles marked by musical references (“nocturnes”, “harmonies”) and a clear preference for moments when the bustle of the river was somewhat stilled (by ice floes, for instance) and late evening scenes with muted twilights and ghostly, half-seen, half-sensed objects.   On the way there, Whistler absorbed the influence of Japanese prints; this led to a few rather odd hybrids in which young women in faintly improbable orientalising costumes look out over a misty Thames and where Jo Hiffernan dresses up in a kimono.

The exhibition ended with a focus on one of his finest works from his Chelsea period, depicting Old Battersea Bridge in the twilight with a rocket from a display in Cremorne Gardens sparkling in the sky.   Though not the central exhibit in the Ruskin case in which Ruskin accused Whistler, in effect, of charging fancy prices for throwing a pot of paint in the eyes of the public and Whistler sued for libel, it was raised in the courtroom debates and Whistler was obliged to explain his thinking and methods.  The examination was quoted at some length.  I assume we as the 21^st century audience were being invited to feel very superior to the philistinism of the defence council but the discussion was actually very informative.   It was also intriguing to discover that Whistler was in the habit of writing very rude letters to early patrons or their children if he heard that they were selling his work on at a large profit; perhaps Ruskin had a point on the money side of things.

Old Battersea Bridge was a wonderfully ramshackle wooden affair dating from the 18^th century and something of a favourite subject for Whistler in his Chelsea years.  Of course this piece isn’t a photographically accurate depiction of the bridge (some photographs were included in the show) or even in line with sketches which he made of it on other occasions.   

In particular he gives it a far higher clearance over the river than the rather tunnel-like appearance which its arches appear to have had.  This is probably a case of art imitating art.  A wooden bridge in Edo much loved by artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai has something of the same air as Battersea but was much higher and more curved, more like the bridge of Whistler’s depiction.   The firework display also harked back to Japanese exemplars.

When he painted the bridge in the mid 1870’s, however, its days were numbered.  It was highly unpopular with river users due to the currents and eddies which its multiple piers created- getting past Battersea Bridge was always a far more dangerous process than the very calm progress of the lighter in the picture suggests.   The whole Thames waterside was undergoing massive changes thanks to Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s creation of the Thames Embankment as one element in his wider plans to create a modern sewerage system for London.  One result of the embanking process was that the river was somewhat narrowed and became faster flowing, meaning eventually that the bridges needed to be replaced.  This process was hastened by the passage of an Act of Parliament extinguishing the tolls; traffic on Battersea Bridge immediately increased to such an extent that it became unsafe and access had to be severely restricted (rather defeating the point of removing the tolls).   It was clear that the old bridge would have to go; demolition work started shortly afterwards.   Cremorne Gardens were also finally closed down by a coalition of moral reformers and property developers just after the painting was completed.    The work therefore acquired an air of nostalgia for a world about to pass away, which may not have been entirely intended-Whistler may have enjoyed the old but had no qualms about painting the new world of upper class respectability which developed along the Thames Embankment as the water colour below shows and to the very end of his artistic life the river was a favourite subject.  Nevertheless it made a very fitting climax to an exhibition which showed just how central London’s riverside was to Whistler’s development.

 

All the Queen’s men- and rodents

I know I’m still running horribly behind on writing up the exhibitions I’ve been to see- I guess I’ll have to make a New Year’s resolution to be a bit more timely and assiduous with this blog….

At least the one I’m writing about now is still (just) running if you get a move on and go to the National Portrait Gallery in London.   It deals with portraiture in the reign of Elizabeth I- starting at the top with pictures of the Queen herself and working down through the social classes.   Obviously there’s a limit to how far down the social scale portraiture went; nobody was in the business of painting individual members of the labouring poor just because they had interesting faces (there was no market for that) though one or two favoured servants get into aristocratic or gentry family scenes as in the beautifully depicted nurse holding the infant John Dunch  above  (little John fell victim to the horrendous rate of infant mortality of the time). 

   Nor does there appear to have been much of a taste for the genre scenes drawn from everyday life which make Dutch painting of the 16^th and 17^th centuries something of a window into the lives of fairly ordinary people- even if one which needs to be looked through with caution.   The scene of  festivities in the village of Bermondsey which may (or may not) be by the Dutch artist Joris Hofnagel above is a rarity and a slightly enigmatic one as it’s not certain what the cause of the rejoicing actually is (traditionally it’s assumed to be a wedding on the strength of the very large cakes being carried in procession in the right foreground and the fiddlers playing but there are some problems with this interpretation and it’s even been interpreted as a royal visit to the village).   

The poor (who were, on the whole, getting poorer through Elizabeth’s reign, which was anything but a golden age for the majority of the population) don’t get much of a look in despite genuine efforts on the part of the exhibition curators to find ways of acknowledging them- of which the most startling is the presence of an intact set of clothes in rough brown cloth which appear to have belonged to a sailor (judging from tar residues in the fibres) and amazingly survived the centuries because they became part of a collection of props passed on from artist’s studio to artist’s studio until the late 19^th century.  In some ways this is the most startling item in the show because of the sheer length of odds against the survival of something so commonplace.

With this proviso, it is still noticeable how far down the social scale the commissioning of portraits in Elizabethan England went- indeed contemporary social commentators mocked the vanity of very minor civic dignitaries and petty attorneys in sitting for their portraits.   Perhaps worse, even their wives were getting in on the act, as were the tiny number of women with a professional activity in their own right like the calligrapher Esther Langlois/Inglis/Kello above (strictly speaking she shouldn’t have been in the show as she lived in Scotland for most of her life and only came to London after Elizabeth’s death and the accession of James VI as James I in England- but she did produce beautiful manuscripts for a cross-border elite market).

Brewers and butchers like the aptly named Gamaliel Pye ensured that their looks were commemorated for posterity.  Pye indeed embodies the ambiguities of the age, as a man who was highly respected in his trade, a generous donor to charity- and a convicted breaker of legislation which controlled slaughtering and imposed price controls on meat.  

There was at times a degree of unease about the process of having your likeness taken, at least among those of a more religious cast of mind who worried about breaking the Second Commandment.  This perhaps explains the tendency of portraits- especially those of the ”middling sort” and lesser gentry- to include very visible signs of piety like skulls to assist meditation on mortality or moralising inscriptions.  It may partly also explain the tendency to cite the age at which the portrait was painted- this was evidently used as a stimulus to pious thoughts and reflections on the passage of time itself as the musician Thomas Whythorne explained in his memoirs.

Others, not all of them necessarily that much higher up the social scale, appear to have had fewer scruples about portraiture.   The flamboyant assertiveness of Martin Frobisher (pirate, slaver-trader, Arctic explorer, bankrupt, captain of a Queen’s ship….) doesn’t suggest a man with many scruples about the propriety of having his image recorded, though in an earlier age a semi-literate West Country skipper would hardly have qualified for this sort of immortalisation.  Admittedly this was something of an institutional commission, done on behalf of the Cathay Company which had been set up to exploit trade with China through the North West Passage which Frobisher was seeking in the Arctic.   His navigations in the Davis Strait and into Baffin Bay for a brief moment looked as if they would more than pay their way even without reaching China when rocks he brought back were assayed as containing gold- fools gold, as it transpired, as the voyage to ship back piles of stone for treatment pushed the Company to the edge of bankruptcy and the absence of gold sent it over.  The Queen, who had invested her own money in the venture, was not at all amused and Frobisher was out of favour for years until his services were required to fight the Spanish Armada.  The stone, incidentally, can still be seen in the defences of Dartford….

Portraiture was obviously more of a regular feature of life for an aristocracy much obsessed with lineage and descent- the Elizabethan period stood at the very start of the English elite preoccupation with creating galleries of paintings depicting members of a noble lineage over the generations as one way of asserting the legitimate descent of property and lands.  At times the portraits formed part of displays which set them in a wider context and are now lost or were destroyed as tastes changed, which perhaps leads to an overestimate of just how important each individual painting actually was, but their basic role in preserving the memory of great (or notorious) ancestors is clear.  Not every aristocratic portrait in the show fitted into this model.  For instance the distinctly intimate depiction of  the Countess of Southampton  below is unique and must have been created for very particular reasons, possibly for the benefit of a husband who had drawn the Queen’s displeasure by marrying her at all (they both spent some time in prison as a result). 

  The show contains several more conventional paintings of family groups or husband and wife pairings and I suspect a genuinely representative collection of portraits from the period would contain even more- there’s a natural tendency to focus on paintings which either depict important individuals or are in some way interesting or idiosyncratic.   Perhaps the most unlikely presence in the show is the Sultan of Morocco’s ambassador, who had come to London in the hope of getting English help to open up a new front in the war against Spain (he failed, though the English had little vested objection to collaborating with Islamic states against their shared enemy and when King James made peace with Spain early in his reign a number of English sailors went off to join the Barbary corsair states).

The quality of art on display is pretty variable.   It’s understandable that work undertaken by jobbing painters in provincial centres is pretty stiff and naïve but even the rich and aristocratic could struggle to get a quality piece done and often had to rely on passing Dutch or Flemish artists.  Elizabeth’s court never managed to attract any genuinely top drawer artists from continental Europe (the best of them, Hans Eworth, was hardly in the Holbein league), possibly because her notorious parsimony on everything expect perhaps her personal adornment made it an unattractive place to seek work.  Her Sergeant Painter George Gower’s self-portrait stresses how his artistic skills trump his gentry origins as the basis for his claims to enhanced social status but he, like other English artists of the time, was distinctly old fashioned, happier with the texture of textiles and draperies than in trying to depict a human body in a credible three dimensional space.   

It didn’t help that the most talented artists in England were miniaturists like Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver; men brilliant at squeezing a depiction into a tiny space (say for a ring or a pendant) but rather at sea when it came to working on a grader scale- a couple of works in the show have been tentatively attributed to Hilliard but they have little of the quality of his miniatures.  

The portraits of Elizabeth herself are therefore a bit of a mixed bag, often longer on recording the sheer magnificence of her frocks and jewellery than on giving a half way credible depiction of what she looked like (this was definitely not a culture in which less was more or where restraint was in any way valued).   Matters got ever more complex as she grew older.   While the portrait at the top of this piece, dating from the 1570’s, probably gives a fair sense of what the queen looked like in her forties (and a formidable lady she appears to be), the same cannot be said of later depictions.  In some cases (for instance when a royal portrait was commissioned by an aristocrat as a visible symbol of loyalty for the Great Hall) the painter might well never have seen the monarch at close quarters and would have to rely on earlier portraits or even the images on the coinage to get a sense of her appearance.   In others there was a simple refusal to depict the ageing Queen as she really was.  

Take the rather odd painting below as an example, in which Elizabeth participates in a procession involving key members of her court (she is not actually being borne shoulder high like some kind of devotional statue in a religious procession- the men are carrying a canopy as she is pushed on a kind of trolley by a couple of Yeomen of the Guard half visible behind her).  This was painted some time after 1600.   It’s probably not a depiction of a specific event and the whole thing has a very stagey look in part because of the thoroughly unconvincing perspective and background.   For all that, the various members of the procession are recognisable, as is the message it’s intended to convey of an elite group solidly grouped round their monarch.   The balding figure in pink in the foreground, the Earl of Worcester, may well have commissioned the work to celebrate his restoration to favour as Master of the Horse (in charge, inter alia, of court ceremonials of this very kind)  after the Earl of Essex was sacked for crossing Elizabeth once too often.  His son, Lord Herbert, is the man in white striking postures on the right- possibly pointing to his newly married wife.   On the face of it, this depicts a cohesive elite united around their queen.  Elizabeth, though, is depicted as if she was still in the 1570’s.  By the time this was painted she was an increasingly frail old woman verging on her seventies, with rotting teeth and a red wig.  The increasingly hysterical courtly adulation of the Virgin Queen in the 1590’s and into the 1600’s (Thomas Morley’s madrigal collection “The Triumphs of Oriana” dates from more or less the same time as this painting) scarcely hid the extreme nervousness of the elite over what was going to happen when she eventually died or what upheavals might occur in her dotage- Essex was to die on the scaffold in 1601 for a crack-brained attempt at a palace coup.  Plots and counter-plots abounded.   Sir Walter Raleigh was up to his neck in them, for instance, including (as historical research over the past fifty years has demonstrated) dabbing in treason with the Spanish.  In the end James VI of Scotland succeeded with minimal stir (not least because key members of the Elizabethan establishment had already put plans in place for that to happen)- the fact that he was an adult male Protestant with children ultimately trumping his Scottishness, especially as the alternative contenders were all female.   The painting depicts a moment when nobody could have been sure that England would avoid a civil war when the old woman died and the official line was to wish that day away by pretending that she was blessed with eternal youth.

I don’t think Elizabeth would have been entirely happy over the fact that she was a bit upstaged in what she would certainly have regarded as her show.   She could probably have lived with the prominence given to the so-called “Ermine Portrait”- after all, its main subject is her, in one of her most fantastical confections of a dress (how on earth did one set about cleaning something like that?  Or was it a one-off, shredded after one wearing with the jewels reused in subsequent gowns?).  The ermine had a respectable place in bestiary lore as a symbol of cleanliness and, by extension, virginity- it was believed that it would pine away and die if its white fur ever got dirty.- and therefore sat nicely within the ideology crafted to glorify the dead end into which she had opted to take her dynasty because she saw no other way of resolving the inherent contradictions involved in being a Queen Regnant in a world where it was axiomatic that a woman was always subordinate to her husband.  

I’m not sure she’d have been so happy with the thought that the star painting in the exhibition and the one which caused most head-scratching over gallery merchandising involved three anonymous children and their pets- see below.   The children look very solemn indeed and the boy on the right looks as if he’s about to strangle his linnet in his efforts to make sure it doesn’t fly away.   The real interest surrounds his elder sister’s guinea pig.  Evidently drawn from the life, this is the earliest depiction of the humble South American rodent in British art.   It must have been a rather exotic pet- guinea pigs, native to Peru, were unknown to Europeans until the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire- and one wonders how this specimen ended up in England.  Cute it may have been but it had no distinguished pedigree of symbolism and implied meanings derived from antiquity to legitimise its place in a painting and I assume it was there because its owner threatened tantrums unless her pet joined her in the painting.   The gallery shop was doing a roaring trade in cuddly toy guinea pigs; there was no postcard available because the painting is in private hands and hasn’t been put on display very often.   The Virgin Queen should have been aware of the old theatrical maxim about appearing with children and animals……

Happy New Year to my readers- I will try to be more assiduous in 2014, honest!