The King Who Never Was

How do you construct an exhibition around so someone who died before they reached their nineteenth birthday- particularly when that individual isn’t a modern rock star but a 17^th century prince?   The National Portrait gallery has taken up this challenge in pulling together a fascinating exhibition on Henry Prince of Wales, eldest son of James VI and I.

Henry’s life doesn’t take a lot of telling.   He was born in 1594 in Stirling Castle (so I suppose I ought to take an interest in him as a fellow Stirlingite) and died, probably of typhoid, in 1612.   His death was greeted with almost hysterical outpourings of grief, at least from the social and cultural elites; his funeral was a far grander affair than that accorded to Queen Elizabeth herself nine years earlier.   Clearly this response could not have been inspired by many concrete achievements.   In his lifetime Henry became the focus of a form of 17^th century media cult, a screen on which others projected their hopes and aspirations and fantasies.  In the years immediately following his death his memory was invoked by those who (against the policy of King James) wished to see direct British combatant involvement in the opening phases of the 30 Years War.  Later, as the country slithered inexorably towards civil war, memories of Henry were tinged with nostalgia for a lost Golden Age cut short by his death, with the implied sub-text that things would never have reached such a pass if he had lived to become Henry IX.   It is no coincidence that the first printed biography of Prince Henry was published in 1641, dedicated to Charles Prince of Wales (the later Charles II).

In other words, any exhibition dedicated to Prince Henry is going to be as much about image as reality, fantasy as achievement.  The actual flesh and blood young man upon whose shoulders so many grandiose dreams were hung risks vanishing beneath the ideal prince whose features were projected on to him.  

All eldest sons of kings had a certain innate charisma in the medieval and early modern period from the moment they popped out of the womb- it went with the knowledge that this howling infant would, if he was lucky with disease and the other accidents of childhood, one day be the king himself.  Henry however experienced a more than averagely strong investment in his person on the part of others, particularly after his father had come into his English inheritance in 1603.   A lot of this was to do with James’ shortcomings.  There was huge initial enthusiasm for his accession.   Indeed it’s hard to overstate just how much relief there was that God’s proper order had at last been restored and that England was again, after nearly sixty years in which the realm was ruled first by a minor then by two successive childless females, under the sway of an adult Protestant male whose succession was already settled (the obligatory adulation of Gloriana had worn very thin indeed by the time Elizabeth died and its very shrillness never quite overcame the niggling sense that a Queen Regnant was fundamentally unnatural).  Unfortunately on closer inspection James was less than ideal.   He was physically unimpressive (weak legs and an overlarge tongue) and thoroughly unheroic.    He was far too keen on projects which inspired little enthusiasm amongst the elites of both England and Scotland (promoting full union between the kingdoms, schemes for the reunification of Christendom) and not keen enough on ones which the English elites loved (fighting Spain, preferably through state-sponsored piracy, conducting an aggressively Protestant policy in support of his daughter and son-in-law after 1618).   He had a prodigious intellect- and made sure everybody else knew about it.   He was soft on Catholics, even after Guy Fawkes and his colleagues tried to blow him up (it didn’t help that his wide, Anne of Denmark, converted to Catholicism).  He had absolutist tendencies and could not bring himself to take Parliament as seriously as it took itself.   He was extravagant and had favourites (the latter being code for “was thoroughly bisexual and enjoyed the company of handsome young men, whose worldly interests he promoted at the expense of the traditional elites”).   He might not exactly be a Bad King but he wasn’t quite what those who had been counting the hours until the old queen died were looking for either.

It isn’t surprising to find that James’ reputation has been re-evaluated in recent years, usually in a positive direction.   Nowadays history is mostly written by professional academics who are more likely to be impressed by his intellectual capacities.   Things which were held against him in his own time - his relatively tolerant approach to religion, his reluctance to take Britain into the continental wars- are now seen either as positive virtues or at least-as in the case of his sexuality- are a matter of indifference.   His absolutist tendencies can be seen as an understandable response to a dysfunctional political and administrative system and don’t look quite so reprehensible in a world which has lost a lot of the knee-jerk reverence for Parliament which prevailed even fifty years ago.  Even his violent opposition to smoking has put him on the right side of history.

Posthumous vindication is all very well (and my own view is that the pendulum has perhaps swung a bit too far the other way on James) but it didn’t do much for James in his lifetime.   His shortcomings created a very visible space which Henry filled.   He was (obviously) young and physically active, keen on military training and very willing to participate in the neo-chivalric panoply of jousting and more or less staged combats within court theatrical performances which were so prominent in English court festivities.  Although church attendance wasn’t much emphasised, his household was suitably Protestant, staffed by military men and run on military lines- and a Catholic-free zone.   He was learned enough to keep his end up but not a bookworm or a clerk (his writing tutor made an acid comment about the quality of his penmanship in one of the doodle-covered princely exercise books displayed in the show).   He was a keen sponsor of ship building- the largest vessel in the royal fleet, the “Prince Royal” was built at his behest and a small ship for his own personal use was under construction when he died- and encouraged exploration voyages in search of the North West Passage.  He was also emerging as a keen patron of the arts when his life was cut tragically short.   In other words, he was ideally suited for the Protestant Prince role which so many in England- those who had done well out of Elizabeth’s wars and a younger generation full of half-digested chivalric impulses- were desperate to see filled.   At its most radical, he was viewed as the New Constantine who would lead a Protestant Crusade to crush the Papal Antichrist under the ruins of St Peter’s.

It’s not surprising that the myth has grown up that James and his son were very much at odds.   In its more extreme forms, the claim is that relations between them were as bad as those later routinely encountered between the Hanoverian monarchs and their eldest sons, with father and son running parallel, mutually hostile, courts.  This always looked a stretch; for one thing, the Hanoverian princes in question were men in their twenties and thirties when they fell out with their fathers.   The current view embraced in the exhibition catalogue is that this is simply untrue.   Henry was brought up according to the principles established by James himself (in excruciating detail) in his advice book “Basilikon Doron” (lots of martial exercises and no football).   His household was staffed by James’ nominees, answerable to the king rather than to Henry.   James, it is suggested, was self-aware enough to realise that he didn’t tick all the boxes for ideal kingship and was content to let his son cover areas where he was weak- being royal, then as now, was a family business.  It’s even suggested that James was prepared to allow people to think he and his son had differences of opinion as a way of keeping options open and avoiding irrevocable commitments.   Even if this may be a bit over-sophisticated, the reality is that there were few major areas of potential disagreement during Henry’s lifetime; the serious divisions over how best to support his sister Elizabeth and her husband Frederick the Elector Palatine (first in the latter’s claim to the throne of Bohemia and then in trying to get his lands back after the Holy Roman Emperor confiscated them in the wake of the collapse of his Bohemian venture) only come after 1618.    Like any self respecting teenager Henry grumbled about his parents and their fuddy duddy ways while James was (quite reasonably) concerned that the adulation surrounding Henry would go to his head and make him vulnerable to bad advisors.  There was clearly considerable latent scope for discord had Henry lived- but he didn’t.

Some other aspects of the myth of Prince Henry don’t stand up to much close examination.  The “no Catholics need apply” rule only applied to his very immediate household.  He was happy to appear in masques designed and staged by Inigo Jones, who came from a Catholic background.    He worked closely with (and lavishly funded) a Tuscan special envoy to his father’s court in drawing up increasingly elaborate garden designs for the palace of Richmond which was in the process of being modernised to serve as his primary residence when he died.  In reality it was very difficult to do princely magnificence around 1610 without dealing with Catholics- be they Italian architects and garden designers or Flemish painters and tapestry designers.    The “warrior prince” image also requires considerable qualification.  He cultivated the companionship of military men and corresponded with major commanders like Prince Maurice of Nassau.  He appears to have enjoyed his participation in jousts and was happy to be depicted at pike exercise (though the pike he’s training with below clearly isn’t the 16 foot long monster carried by a common soldier).   He was certainly portrayed often enough in armour (a couple of particularly beautiful suits which he owned are in the show) and even in vaguely military settings.  Maybe he did dream of military glory and maybe he would have been a fine soldier if he had been put to the test.   The reality is that he never heard a shot fired in anger and we can never know whether in practice he would have been any more belligerent than his father.   For all the rather nagging insistence on his vigour and fondness for strenuous exercise the portrait record suggests a rather slightly built young man- just how robust was his health even prior to the illness which carried him off?  

So how in the end does one disentangle the man from the myth?  Does it even make sense to talk of Prince Henry’s own tastes and preferences, given the way in which others moulded the face he presented to the world?   I’m not sure- and I’m not enough of an expert on the period to be totally confident in my guesses. 

For what it’s worth, I think the naval interests were real.   While I don’t for one moment suppose that Prince Henry would have been pulling on the ropes or swarming up the rigging of his personal ship, the notion of a royal prince going pleasure cruising in English waters was genuinely novel. There was no precedent for royalty messing round in boats- even monarchs who took an interest in naval affairs rarely if ever took to the sea just for the pleasure of it.  Henry was engaged enough to form close links with his favourite naval architect, the talented but corrupt Phineas Pett (one of a dynasty of ship designers and dockyard administrators prominent in English naval affairs for generations- Samuel Pepys had repeated run-ins with another Pett seventy years later).   Indeed he turned up in person to put the frighteners on an inquiry investigating allegations of corruption against Pett, who was acquitted rather in the teeth of the evidence.   I think the art loving was genuine as well.  His father showed no interest in collecting (not even books).  While Henry didn’t live long enough to commission any significant art in his own right, he was dabbling in the art market by his death, using intermediaries well placed to be up with the latest trends in European painting and literature.  Most of the art which entered his possession came by way of presents and inheritances but presumably you don’t give a prince a present which he’s unlikely to appreciate.  It’s also intriguing that Henry inspired Robert Peake, the official Serjeant Painter to the King, to produce work quite unlike anything else he painted.  Peake’s portraits were normally in the very backward looking Elizabethan tradition, almost as rigid and static as Orthodox icons and revelling in the surface glitter and sheen of rich textiles and jewellery.   Henry inspired him to a much freer and more active style- and even to create the first full size equestrian portrait of an English royal, a strange allegorical piece depicting Henry in tilt armour pulling Father Time along behind him.   This very literal take on a young man in a hurry becomes almost unbearably poignant when one knows that its subject was dead within two or three years of its creation.

Which, perhaps, leads to the inevitable unanswerable question- would the reign of a putative Henry IX in fact have been the golden age of so many dreams?   I wonder.   On the positive side, Henry clearly had far more charisma than either his father or his brother Charles and (to the extent that the “Protestant Prince” image accurately reflected his real preferences) he was probably more in tune with the views of important elements of the English elite than either of them.   Perhaps that’s the problem.   It’s all too easy to see Henry, who appears to have been genuinely close to both of his siblings and liked his brother-in-law Frederick as well, deciding to undertake a full on military commitment on behalf of Elizabeth and her husband the moment he was at liberty to do so.   Would his charisma and the apparent popularity of the Protestant cause have persuaded the Parliamentary classes to put their hands in their pockets and vote for the taxes which would have been necessary to create and maintain a credible army in the field?   I have my doubts.  When Charles finally gave Parliament the war against Spain it had been baying for its response was grudging in the extreme.   The English parliament had a history stretching back to the 1370’s of believing war could be waged on the cheap and that royal resources were quite adequate for the job with minimal recourse to taxation if applied properly.  No amount of evidence to the contrary ever seemed to shake this conviction for long and the usual response to failure and inadequate funding was to cry corruption and start witch hunts aimed at whichever royal minister happened to be unpopular at the time (the corruption was usually real enough, but a red herring in the big scheme of things).   The Pett affair suggests that Henry was every bit as tolerant of corruption in favoured servants as his father had been.   He seems to have enjoyed the masques which have been very much held against his brother and cited as proof of how out of touch Charles was.  One suspects that his court would have been every bit as extravagant as that of his father- and the tendency of contemporary historians to take a more generous view of the kind of extravagance which can be labelled “discerning cultural patronage” was not shared by 17^th century commentators (unless of course they were the direct recipients of the patronage).     I suspect the sheen would have gone off the golden boy once he actually had to make decisions with real world consequences.   It’s easy to imagine him leading a typically under-resourced, under-equipped English army of raw recruits and village troublemakers forcibly enlisted to get rid of them to catastrophic defeat in Germany (like the Ile de Rhe fiasco of 1627, only without a fleet to evacuate survivors).    He might well have been killed (or, worse, captured) in the process.   Even if that worst case scenario had not materialised, it’s entirely plausible that his putative reign might have been as troubled as that of his brother, though for somewhat different reasons.   It’s quite tempting to create a dystopic alternative history in which the king whose head was chopped off on a chilly January morning in 1649 was the terminally discredited figure of Henry IX

In reality, of course, Henry didn’t live long enough to disappoint anyone and died with his aura intact.   The Peake canvas below has a rather different poignancy.   In this the Prince’s companion is Robert Devereux, Third Earl of Essex (and son of Elizabeth’s fallen favourite).   When the English Parliament raised an army to fight Henry’s brother in 1642, Essex (by then a seasoned soldier from the German wars) was appointed its commander.    I wonder if he remembered posing for the portrait over thirty years before…… 

Reactionary Modernism?

In a British context there can’t be many safer crowd pullers for an art gallery than a Pre-Raphaelite exhibition.   The Tate Britain is currently hosting one (a good strategy as the gallery is under major reorganisation at the moment and without a strong special show would be virtually deserted) which tries to say something new about this group of eminent Victorians.  The exhibition (which will be going off to Washington DC next year) is contains lots of beautiful things even though I’m not sure its underlying argument is entirely persuasive.

This is not to deny its real merits.   Unusually the exhibition actually includes a genuine piece of chronologically pre-Raphaelite Italian art (a panel from a Lorenzo Monaco diptych which was acquired by the National Gallery and first displayed in 1848).  It’s helpful to be reminded that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) developed their approach to art at least partially in direct reaction to the increased availability and visibility of 14^th and 15^th century art (Italian and Flemish) in public collections- in other words, their expressed preference for what was then known as “primitive” art responded to a shift in aesthetic values amongst the artistic elites which was already well under way in Britain and across Europe by the 1840’s. 

The exhibition also goes a bit beyond the usual suspects (though these are well represented too).  It’s nice to see Lizzie Siddal getting recognition as an artist in her own right, rather than the muse/mistress/wife role she’s usually cast in.  The model who nearly died of pneumonia after Millais made her lie in a cold bath for hours on end as he painted “Ophelia” was a talented artist in her own right, as the small works exhibited in the show demonstrate.   It’s interesting to see just how long a shadow Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics cast on the nascent world of artistic photography- as well as in the more familiar area of interior decoration, represented by a good display of William Morris furnishings and needlework.

After looking at the origins of the PRB, the show takes a thematic approach under broad headings like “History”, “Salvation” or “Mythologies”.   This has some slightly odd results- “Salvation” includes Ford Madox Brown’s iconic “Work” (of which more later), whose overt religious content is fairly limited, for instance.   Although not overtly chronological, this actually results in a hang which goes through from the PRB’s origins in the 1840’s to its mutation into the “art for arts sake” Aesthetic Movement and the latter’s Arts and Crafts offshoot from the 1860’s.  Definitions can be a bit of a problem; the “pure” PRB was actually a pretty short lived affair, active for a few years around 1850, and Ford Madox Brown was never a formal member; on the other hand, the core members of the Brotherhood like Hunt, Millais and Rosetti were obviously artistically active for many years beyond that point.   The drift away from an initial commitment to “realism” into a world of romantic mythologies- gorgeous women and an idealised medieval world of Arthurian legend- is striking.

The hang made me conscious of certain aspects of Pre-Raphaelite art which hadn’t really stuck me before.  One is just how literary the inspiration for so much of their art was.  Shakespeare obviously figures prominently as a source of inspiration, as does Chaucer to a lesser extent (though Burne Jones’ choice of the deeply unpleasant anti-Semitic “Prioress’ Tale” when decorating a piece of furniture brings one up a bit short).   Much more contemporary writers, some largely forgotten nowadays (I don’t think Coventry Patmore ranks very high on the Amazon sales charts) also rank high.  The storyline for “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” may have initially been located in Boccaccio but Holman Hunt’s appropriation of the topic owes more to Keats’ poem.   The 14^th century self-proclaimed Roman Tribune Cola di Rienzo comes on to the PRB radar screen thanks to Bulwer Lytton’s novel.  The thoroughly contemporary poetry of Tennyson inspires a number of paintings- not just the “Lady of Shalott”, whose most famous artistic offspring (the Waterhouse painting) isn’t in the show because its creator has for some reason been entirely excluded (I assume he’s viewed as too late and too far from the core PRB group) though she still gets in courtesy of Lizzie Siddal.   The 18^th century teenage poet and forger of medieval writings Chatterton is memorialised.   Overall the PRB and their associates seem to have responded to a past viewed through a strong literary filter of mostly recent manufacture.  It is interesting that the more “aesthetic” figures were also more open to the influence of “genuine” medieval literature (William Morris’ interest in Norse sagas and other medieval writings, Burne Jones’ enthusiasm for Thomas Mallory’s version of the Arthurian legends alongside the Tennysonian one).

It’s also a very British filter, with few “foreign” authors apart perhaps from Dante making much of a showing unless in some way they have an English language “chaperone”.   This is part of another aspect of the PRB and their associates which struck me forcefully in this show- their nationalism.  Admittedly this is often expressed in oblique ways and was by no means uncritical of the shortcomings of Victorian Britain (a point I’ll come back to) but it’s still there  It’s very visible in  Ford Madox Brown’s admiring nod to the first English language Bible in his early painting of John Wycliffe giving scriptural readings to the Black Prince and his family, with Chaucer and Gower in attendance to link the literary and sacred roots of modern English.  It also hangs over even apparently innocuous landscapes like “Our English Coasts” below.  This was painted by Holman Hunt in 1852 in direct response to a surge of invasion panic after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III.   One reaction was a flurry of volunteer military activity- Hunt and Millais both joined volunteer rifle corps, as indeed did Tennyson, who set himself up as the Volunteer Movement’s poet laureate.    Hunt’s painting was a more indirect one, depicting the conspicuously undefended coastline near Hastings and dropping a heavy hint that the British people were a flock of leaderless sheep in sore need of a firm governing hand to steer them away from danger.   Interestingly, when the painting was shown in Paris in 1855 it was given the much more neutral title of “Straying Sheep”- by then Napoleon III was an ally in the Crimean War…..

The dangers threatening the English sheep in the 1840’s and 50’s were not just secular ones like French invasion.   This was an era of deep religious division, with controversy hanging over the status of the Roman Catholic church in Britain compounded by the divisions within the Church of England which ultimately saw the major figures in the High Church faction like John Henry Newman defect to Rome.   The third aspect of Pre-Raphaelite art (at least in its formative period before, say, 1860) which emerged very clearly from the exhibition was the strongly religious element which it contained.   “Religion” isn’t necessarily a term one associates all that strongly with the PRB, especially given their distinctly non-stereotypically Victorian private lives, but it was clearly a major influence on their art.  It’s probably most transparent for Holman Hunt, whose “Light of the World” was toured round the world by its eventual owner and endlessly reproduced, but religious themes were a mainstay of their production across the board, at least until the shift to “art for arts sake” in the 1860’s.   Just how they stood in the arguments of the day is harder to work out.   Some of the figures on the fringes of the PRB were clearly attracted to High Church views, while the group’s interest in medieval devotional art would on the surface appear to have predisposed them towards a more favourable view of Catholicism.   It didn’t quite work like that.  

Blatantly anti-Catholic works were rare- Millais’s clumsily named "A Huguenot, on St Bartholemew's Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic Badge" is the exception rather than the rule- but it was certainly possible to read some of their religious works in that light, with their intense focus on a highly direct personal relationship with a very human Jesus.   Apparently non-religious works like “Our English Coasts” were allegorised by anti-Catholic cultural commentators like John Ruskin in religious terms. Their religious works sold mainly to patrons of Low Church evangelical leanings.    Dante Gabriel Rosetti may have come from an Italian background and been very influenced by the art of Quattrocento Italy but his father was a republican political exile from a milieu which detested the Papacy on political as much as religious grounds and the Rosetti family’s rather complex relationship with Christianity was basically Protestant in flavour.   While Millais’ “Christ in the Home of His Parents” was jammed full of enough allegories and prefigurations of the Gospels to delight any medieval artist, its un-idealised presentation of a very ordinary family in a very ordinary carpenter’s workshop raised an outcry (led by none other than Charles Dickens) for its perceived lack of reverence; its defenders again came largely from the evangelical party. 

 Holman Hunt tended towards a non-denominational evangelical approach, though some of his most obviously religious pieces are very hard to interpret in denominational terms- are the Christian priests hunted by angry Druids High Church Anglicans being hounded for wearing the wrong vestments (a big issue of the day) or are they intended to stress the pre-Papal roots of a British Christianity which long predated St Augustine’s mission to Kent in the 590’s?   The key point, however, is that religious issues mattered for the PRB and played a big role in their art.

So far so good.  Where I have more problems with the exhibition is its attempts to claim the Pre-Raphaelites as modernists.  The “Avant Garde” of the exhibition title is fair enough- they did see themselves as something of a path breaking elite set against the prevalent tendencies of their day- but the very name they chose to adopt makes presenting them as modernists a tall order.   Groups favouring an artistic embrace of the contemporary world (one plausible definition of modernism) don’t generally take a name which implies that art went off the rails some three hundred years before and spend much of their energy painting the worlds of the more or less distant past.

On a technical level it is obviously possible to point to aspects of Pre-Raphaelite practice which could be seen as forward looking.   They were into painting in the open air a decade or so before the Impressionists decided that this was the way to go- though they were actually quite late adopters of the advances in paint technology and packaging which facilitated outdoor painting.  Like all artists active around 1850, they had to cope with the invention and rapid development of photography; while (contrary to what critics often alleged) they don’t seem to have worked up landscapes from photographs, photography does seem to have affected some of their approaches to, say, the rendering of perspective. 

Subject matter is a separate issue.   The PRB certainly made a big thing about “realism” and “truth to nature” in their programmatic statements.   After 1860, however, Rosetti and the core PRB members were generally painting portraits of beautiful women- usually Janey Morris, Lizzie Siddal or Francis Cornforth under various mythological-sounding names (the kind of work which probably best corresponds to popular understandings of “Pre Raphaelite”, in fact), sometimes commissioned works depicting members of the social elite.  Burne Jones was well launched in his vein of medievalist escapism alongside acting as designer for William Morris, who was pursuing his own agendas, to which I’ll return.   Not all that much “realism” there (the argument that Burne Jones was somehow modernist because he provided an escape from Victorian materialism strikes me as pretty strained, to say the least).  

What of the 1850’s, before the “aesthetic turn”?   It would be misleading to suggest that the PRB and their associates never painted any contemporary scenes- obviously they did.  What is striking (by comparison with, say, the Impressionists) is how selective they were in their coverage of the modern world.   I can’t think of a single railway engine or factory in any of the paintings in the exhibition.    London is reduced to a remote skyline viewed at the very edge of a thoroughly bucolic Hampstead Heath or a view of Regent’s Park which make it look like deep countryside.   There is something of an agenda of the city as place of corruption- the docks make a showing in the background to a moralising piece by Spence Stanhope whose message is somewhat undercut by the glamour of the fallen woman at its centre.   There is also a strand of social criticism, though it’s interesting that the victims of the Victorian social order who qualify for coverage tend to be either the traditional rural poor or the middle classes (the couple forced to emigrate in Ford Madox Brown’s “Last of England”, impersonated by the artist and his wife).  The urban industrial working classes, the focus of most social reform concern in the period, get very little showing.

This is even true of Ford Madox Brown’s monumental “Work” (see top).   This is an endlessly fascinating, multi-layered piece and one could literally spend hours trying to decode every detail (there’s a huge amount going on in every corner of the painting).   I won’t even try to interpret it all here, even if I could- there’s just so much of it and a lot of the detail is quite enigmatic on close inspection.   In very basic terms, a gang of navvies is (more or less) hard at work installing sewerage pipes in Hampstead, under the gaze of Thomas Carlyle and the Christian Socialist thinker the Rev F D Maurice on the right of the picture (Carlyle is the one with the strange leer looking out of the painting).  A group of casual agricultural labourers can just be seen resting up by the roadside.   Representatives of various social classes squeeze by on the left or inspect the work in the background; street urchins play on the very edge of the site (no Health and Safety worries in the 1850’s).   On the main road to the right a line of sandwich board men walks up the hill in an early example of electoral advertising calling on the electorate to “Vote for Bobus”; barely visible on the right hand edge behind Maurice’s head a policeman knocks a female orange seller’s basket over.  

On one level the message is clear enough- a glorification of the power and energy of the working man and an implied assertion that his (and it is very much his- working women are almost invisible) role in society should be more highly valued.  It is perhaps revealing that Brown focuses this sentiment on building labourers, perhaps the most “archaic” and pre-modern sector of the Victorian urban working population after agricultural labourers (the painting dates from some twenty years before anybody thought of trying to trade unionise unskilled workers).    This glorification of labour was, in rather different ways, in line with the views propounded by both of the intellectual onlookers. 

The details however are much harder to interpret.   For instance, the wall on the left hand edge is covered with advertisements for various self-improvement classes aimed at working class audiences.  Are we meant to assume this gang will pop along to one of them after they knock off?   The worker in the red waistcoat, clearly something of a swell, is obviously literate to judge for the newspaper under his arm- but he also sports a black eye.   What’s been going on here?   The lady third from the left is a Temperance activist to judge for the titles of the tracts she carries; she doesn’t look likely to find much of an audience among this group of workers, one of whom is ostentatiously quaffing a pint.  Sturdy working class independence from meddling do-gooders or moral weakness?   The strangely dressed, ragged (and to my eye slightly gender-ambiguous) figure on the far left is apparently engaged in selling foliage that would go in the bottom of bird cages (this comes from the catalogue- I’m taking it on trust…)- and apparently typed as a non-worker deliberately pushed to the fringes of society.   What of the urchins frolicking in the foreground?  The little girl seems to be trying to discipline her brother (which presumably is good) but her tattered red dress implies that she’s destined to end up on the streets.  

The presence of Carlyle may offer some clues- and they’re slightly disquieting ones, at least when viewed from a 21^st century perspective.   “Bobus” was one of his literary inventions- an upwardly mobile middle class entrepreneur and a venomous caricature of a man and a class which had got above itself and needed to be cut down to size.  Carlyle may have glorified the creative aspects of labour but he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to give these fine working men the vote- he despised Parliamentary democracy, feared the mob and idolised strong leaders, ideally issued from the people but not answerable to them.  It is interesting that one of the heroes Carlyle worshipped was Oliver Cromwell, whom Brown later depicted not in his hours of triumph but as a struggling yeoman framer on the way to market.   In many ways Carlyle could be seen as embodying a strand of Modernist thought- a thoroughly reactionary one which fed directly into some of the 20^th century’s darkest ideologies.  How far Brown bought into every detail of Carlyle’s views is unclear- Maurice took a more generous view of humanity- but it would certainly be possible to read “Work” in a Carlylean key.

The most overtly “political” member of the wider Pre-Raphaelite circle was of course William Morris, who was active in Socialist circles for much of the later years of the 19^th century.   I imagine the rather “Pre-Raphaelite” aesthetic of many early Trades Union banners ultimately goes back to his influence, mediated through associates like Walter Crane.  It would certainly be grossly unfair to suggest that Morris retreated into a world of pure aesthetics after 1860; he did his best to link his artistic practice with his principles, particularly after his formal embrace of socialism in the 1880’s.   The results were however rather ambiguous.  Morris’ socialism was pretty idiosyncratic and heavily based on a rather idealised view of medieval guild practice, coupled with an aesthetic and moral aversion to industrialised mass production.   He genuinely sought to run his workshops in line with his ideals; the problem (of which he was acutely aware) was that the beautiful artefacts which emerged from them were only affordable by a very limited wealthy clientele.  This was a circle which he never really squared; give or take the role of the Catholic Church, the ideal future worlds under socialism which he dreamed of in his writings have a disconcerting similarity with the idealised English 13^th century which Charles Augustus Welby Pugin imagined as the highest point of human civilisation.  Again this can be seen as a form of modernism, but in practical terms very much a blind alley.   The nascent Labour Party may have picked up on Morris’ aesthetics but had far too much realism to try to implement his policy recommendations and his ideas ultimately ended up keeping company which I am sure would genuinely have horrified him as “guild socialism” fed into Fascist corporatism in Italy and beyond.  His resurrection as a thinker of the left came, significantly, in the 1980’s from British leftists desperate to unearth any kind of native non-Marxist socialist tradition as the Soviet Union lurched towards intellectual and economic bankruptcy; the fact that his writings could at a stretch be counted as proto-Green was an additional attraction.

I suppose the strange effect of this exhibition is that, by its very obsession with arguing for the modernism of the Pre-Raphaelites, it made me look a lot harder at their work in a more “political” light and, at least to my eyes, the results aren’t entirely comfortable.   They emerge as something of a band of reactionaries (feminist commentators have already had pretty rude things to say about their sexual politics), drawing their economic sustenance from an industrial economy which they did their best to ignore and seem to have despised when they thought about it at all.  The original PRB members have sometimes been given a hard time for “selling out” in old age; I’m not sure (rackety private lives apart) they were ever that far removed from the more conservative parts of the Establishment.   It is perhaps revealing that the “forgotten” Rosetti, William, when not writing art criticism or editing literary journals, had a day job as a senior civil servant and sometimes acted as informal art adviser to successive governments.   This doesn’t make their art less interesting or less beautiful; it does however set them far more firmly in their Victorian context than the Tate exhibition might want to suggest.

Norman Travels

I finally got round to going to the Dulwich Gallery’s show on John Sell Cotman in Normandy.   In fact a substantial number of the pictures in the show aren’t by Cotman at all while not all the Cotmans depict Normandy- and the catalogue looks as if it was prepared for a much smaller and more narrowly focused show with little coverage of the “extraneous” artists and themes.   This doesn’t spoil the exhibition, however.

In his day (meaning in the 1820’s and 30’s), many art experts ranked Cotman above JMW Turner- a remarkable achievement for a man whose career trajectory was mostly provincial (he lived and worked in Norwich for much of his life).  He was one of a clutch of English artists active in the early 19^th century who were instrumental in taking watercolour from being basically a medium for preparatory sketch work to a genre in its own right.  He also played a part in the revaluation of medieval art and, particularly, architecture in progress in the years around the turn of the 19^th century; his visits to Normandy and the work he did there played into that wider agenda.

It takes some mental effort for someone whose academic background lies in medieval studies to remember that what are now basic, self-evident, concepts like Romanesque and Gothic styles of architecture were still in the process of being defined less than two hundred years ago and that even well educated people with a profound interest in the past could find it very hard to “place” buildings in their correct chronological context.  It was, for instance, widely believed that no buildings survived from the Anglo-Saxon period but that buildings erected well after 1066 were nevertheless examples of a “Saxon” style (a view which saw Durham cathedral characterised as a “Saxon “ building in some accounts).  There were major debates over when and where the pointy-arched Gothic style came from – was it an English development which exported to France or vice versa?   Given that this debate was going on in the middle of the Napoleonic wars it’s not surprising that nationalism played a role.  The surprising (and actually rather impressive) element is how limited its role was; the most aggressively Francophobic commentator was slapped down hard by senior members of the Society of Antiquaries in the middle of the war in a way that I don’t think would have happened a hundred years later had a similar dispute arisen over the respective roles of Britain and Germany in a major cultural development.

Obviously with a war going on it was rather difficult to go off and have a look at the evidence in France.  After 1815, however, things were rather different.   Cotman had already had a degree of success with books of engravings of the ancient buildings and other notable antiquities of his native Norfolk and was also known for atmospheric water colours of romantic ruins.   More to the point, perhaps, his main patron and employer, Dawson Turner (no relation to JMW) was a man of wide interests which included antiquarianism.  Turner took an interest in the debates about historic architecture and had a number of contacts in Normandy to whom he could give Cotman introductions which would open doors for him (sometimes quite literally).   Indeed Cotman’s planned work on Norman antiquities was quite explicitly cast as a contribution to improved post-war relations and (in modern terms) a piece of cultural diplomacy designed to underline the antiquity and strength of the cultural links between England and France in general and Normandy and East Anglia in  particular.   Turner’s French contacts were elite figures of broadly royalist sympathies who had gone into exile during the Revolution; in principle ideal partners for this enterprise.  It didn’t quite work out like that- Turner ultimately fell out very badly with his key French contact over matters related to money- but this did not impact much on Cotman’s travels.

Cotman made three visits to Normandy in 1817, 1818 and 1820.   He travelled surprisingly widely given the shortcomings of the transport infrastructure in Restoration France, which condemned him to rumble across the countryside in the notoriously slow and uncomfortable wooden-wheeled “diligence” post coaches.   Life could be uncomfortable away from the major cities; he was arrested as a spy on one occasion (presumably nobody had told the local police the war was over…) and had to abandon sketching one church under a hail of stones thrown by local beggars disgruntled that he hadn’t bought them off.   On the second trip he spent part of his time with Mrs Turner and her daughters (his drawing pupils); this too was problematic as he clearly didn’t tug his forelock enough to the boss’ wife, who complained to her husband about his lack of deference.  She fancied herself as something of an artist in her own right- Cotman sketched her sketching the sculptural decoration of a church door, perhaps as a peace offering.   He never quite managed to cover all the ground he hoped to and sometimes had to rush past places, only to realise later that he should have given them more attention (and occasionally pass off images culled from the works of others as his own to fill the gaps).  Getting good viewpoints could be a struggle; he had to rely on Mrs Turner’s assistance in persuading a Rouen shopkeeper to let him sketch the south door of the cathedral from the upstairs section of the shop.  For all that he appears to have enjoyed the visits and he certainly was very proud of the four volumes of engravings which he published on Norman antiquities- a late portrait of Cotman shows him holding one of them.

The Normandy was still emerging from the upheavals of the Revolution and the Napoleonic regime.   Though not as uniformly and vehemently “white” (i.e. counter-revolutionary) in sentiment as neighbouring Brittany or the Vendee, it had seen its share of fighting in the civil wars of the 1790’s and its economy had suffered badly from the British blockade and Napoleonic Continental System which had in effect shut down maritime trade for a couple of decades.  Castles and religious buildings had been damaged both in fighting and in the dechristianisation policies of the Jacobin republic in 1793-4.  Monastic buildings in particular had been taken over for all manner of secular uses, from cotton spinning workshops to prisons, and remained secularised even under the restored monarchy.

Cotman’s artistic response to this context is muted.  There are very few explicit references to damage inflicted during the revolutionary era in his works.  He did take advantage of temporary roofing put into the church of the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen when it was converted into a military storehouse to get much closer to architectural details than would otherwise have been possible and his depictions of interiors in Mont St Michel make very oblique reference to the monastery’s current function as a prison by tucking members of the military unit who acted as guards into corners to give a sense of scale.   His later watercolours working up sketches he had made into independent pieces take the same line.  The mounted military police interrogating locals in the foreground of the view of Mont St Michel (see top) or even the very well stocked junk shop in the view of Alencon below could be seen as veiled comments on recent history, but ones so subtle as to be very easily overlooked (the junk shop is presumably well stocked with property looted from the nobility and churches which has floated loose into the commercial sphere, possibly after passing through several intervening owners).   This low key approach perhaps reflects the rather fluid attitudes of many in the English elite to recent events in France.   Violent dechristianisation was clearly a bad thing but did that entirely negate traditional English Protestant attitudes to Roman Catholicism?   One of Dawson Turner’s letters suggests that he had no problems with the Revolution turfing monks out of their monastery and the building’s subsequent use as a cotton mill but others were coming round to the view that atheist republicanism was in fact a worse threat than Popery.   Were ruined chateaux monuments to the blind violence of the mob or the sadly predictable pay-back for generations of seigneurial oppression?   Even apparently less contentious developments were changing the townscape of Normandy almost before Cotman’s eyes- a rather magnificent late medieval house in Rouen which he sketched in 1817 had been knocked down by 1820 as a result of economic recovery.   At times there is a rather contemporary sense of recording a fragile and potentially transitory situation for posterity in Cotman’s work.

For all Cotman’s pride in his Norman work, it didn’t provide either fame or fortune.   The four volumes of his study lingered in the publisher’s warehouse for lack of sales and were eventually (in modern terms) remaindered.  Cotman, it seems, had rather misjudged the market.   His books, which were put together in a rather unsystematic and haphazard way, struggled to find a market niche.  They were not quite lavishly illustrated enough to satisfy the 19^th century equivalent of the coffee table market- the colourful, bustling streetscapes of Samuel Prout were much more fun and set the slightly crumbling architecture in a much clearer human context.   They were not structured enough to satisfy the market for travel writing- especially as several other writer/artist teams were also producing work focussed on Normandy in the same period.   They did not even entirely meet the requirements of the scholarly/antiquarian market; the text was a rush job done at the last minute by Dawson Turner, who appears to have been a better botanist than architectural historian and hadn’t seen all the places depicted in the books personally.  Perhaps Cotman’s apparent preference for Romanesque architecture over Gothic was a little out of key with contemporary tastes (it’s interesting that Cotman’s contemporaries represented in the Dulwich show appear to have focussed much more on the region’s Gothic heritage).  

Neither were the free standing watercolours which he worked up from his sketches a huge success; they sold for decent but not outstanding prices and in the end he sold on most of his preparatory sketches.   They were criticised as garish and compared unfavourably with the English landscapes which had made his reputation.   Some of them would certainly have looked rather strange to contemporary eyes, albeit for reasons which contributed to Cotman’s return to favour in the 20^th century- the distinctly Cubist distortions of his account of the landscape round Domfront could be read in a very forward-looking light (see below).   Despite the mixed success of its artistic outcomes, Normandy stayed with Cotman for many years as he worked themes seen during his visits there into his later art- though in increasingly fanciful ways floating free from any anchoring in observed Norman realities.  He never went abroad again.

Pilgrim's Perplexity

You don’t get many chances to see Ralph Vaughan Williams’ opera “The Pilgrim’s Progress” so I thought I had better go along to the current ENO production even though I did so in some trepidation when I saw that the director was a Yoshida Oido, Japanese theatre director with little obvious operatic experience.   Clearly it would be absurd to suggest that only a director who happens to be a believing Christian should be entrusted with the piece (especially given RVW’s own complex religious position) but I was a little concerned at how someone who came from a cultural background very remote in every way from the 17^th century English radical religious world which gave birth to the original book might approach the piece.   His lack of operatic background was another worry.  Regular readers will know my issues with ENO’s propensity for using “celebrity” directors who’ve no feel for opera as a genre and one contributory factor in “Pilgrim’s Progress”’ patchy production record appears to be that the first staging back in 1951 was directed by Professor Neville Coghill, a very distinguished literary historian and sometime theatre director but evidently all at sea with opera- he even made Vanity Fair look dreary.   The show certainly wasn’t the horror story I feared it might be but I’m still in two minds about it- and indeed about what exactly Oida’s interpretation is trying to say.

RVW himself accepted that “Pilgrim’s Progress” might be a hard sell as an opera (he actually preferred to call it a “morality”- though he was insistent that its proper home was the opera house rather than, say, a cathedral).   It’s very episodic and quite static for long periods.  There’s no major female role- RVG wrote the Pilgrim’s family out of the story when he created the libretto.   Even after he simplified the story line substantially in this process there are lots of minor characters who pop up in one scene and never appear again (which means either a massive but rather under-employed cast or lots of doubling and tripling up- ENO take the latter option).  As a book, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” has (perhaps surprisingly) a strong element of movement through a clearly defined physical environment (for instance the Slough of Despond is as much a physical marsh as a spiritual one, as is the river the pilgrim has to cross before reaching the City of Salvation and it appears Bunyan mapped the early stages of his character’s journey on to a very specific and identifiable landscape round Bedford).   Clearly this is almost impossible to convey convincingly on stage.

It’s probably an even harder sell now than it was in 1951.  John Bunyan’s book may still be hailed as a classic of English literature but I suspect it’s more hailed than read in a largely de-Christianised society where even Bunyan’s Baptist heirs are generally closer to Mr By-Ends in their religious sentiments than to the clear cut simplicities of his own faith.  Bunyan reborn in 21st century Britain would probably be regarded as a deranged fanatic - indeed my suspicion is that history would repeat itself and he would fetch up in prison (or perhaps mental hospital).   You certainly can’t assume the very high levels of basic scriptural literacy which would have been found amongst even those without any religious faith back in the early 1950’s.

This last group arguably included RVW himself.   Although he was the son of an Anglican clergyman, he was also related to Charles Darwin and grew up with the disputes over faith and science echoing around his home environment.   At one point early in his career he asked (one imagines rather belligerently) why an atheist couldn’t write a mass if he wanted to.   He was a however a rather odd sort of atheist; a man who wrote a lot of very fine church music and clearly responded very strongly to the language of the King James Bible (which he plundered ruthlessly in creating the “Pilgrim’s Progress” libretto) as well as the poetry of 17^th century religious writers (have a listen to his “Five Mystical Songs”…).   At other times he defined himself as a Christian agnostic.    He certainly wasn’t an atheist of a narrowly dogmatic and exclusionary bent- there’s a deeply mystical strain to much of his music and a very strong sense of the transcendent.   It is interesting that his adaptation of Bunyan’s book sees Pilgrim (renamed from Bunyan’s Christian with the explicit aim of universalising the character) very much on his own in his pilgrimage- not only do his family drop out of the picture but his companions Faithful and Hopeful disappear from the story- and in a very direct personal relationship with the spiritual forces around him, after the manner of mystics in all religious traditions.

So what of the actual production?    As I said at the outset, I’m still not sure about it- especially the second section (ENO chose to split the performance in the middle of Act III when Pilgrim is imprisoned in the town of Vanity for condemning the goings on at Vanity Fair).    Oida sets the entire action within the prison where we first encounter John Bunyan working on his text.  When he falls asleep and dreams the story of Pilgrim (played by the same performer- who is on stage for just about the entire piece), the dream very largely plays out within that environment, with the other characters mostly wearing the grey uniforms of the other inmates or the military khaki of the guards.   Obviously this doesn’t apply in all cases but it’s a dream so a certain lack of logic is allowed….    In the first section this actually works reasonably well; the somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere may be a bit at odds with Bunyan but corresponds quite well a reading of the story which sees Pilgrim’s journey as essentially an internal one conducted within the character’s soul.    Admittedly he looks a bit like a dismounted Don Quixote when kitted out in the distinctly rusty armour of faith prior to the fight with Apollyon but the fight itself (done as a puppet show, with the Foul Fiend incarnated in a massive figure cobbled together from what looks like the prison rubbish dump) works surprisingly well.   Oida nods to RVW’s hope that the piece could be valid for people of any faith or none by introducing elements of non-Christian ritual- it becomes a bit of a game to spot a piece of Parsi fire ritual here and Hindu prayer scarves there- though I doubt if Bunyan would have been very happy at his use of elements of 17^th century European magical practice (at one point Pilgrim takes refuge within a consecrated circle drawn in sand on the floor, for instance) and I don’t quite understand why Evangelist, Pilgrim’s initial spiritual helper, turns up carrying an open umbrella.

Vanity Fair is convincingly lurid- a strange mix of circus costumes and self conscious night club style decadence.   I wondered if Oida would slot in a bit of cross-dressing and I wasn’t disappointed- see above.   It’s a little bizarre that he chose to put the group of biblical villains who frequent the Fair into drag- I doubt if there’s much scriptural warrant for Judas Iscariot dressing like a stripper with tassels on the breasts of a body suit- but I suppose it sets the decadent tone.   They’re also a bit too over-the-top for my taste, though Demas (the Bad Thief from Calvary- normally known as Dismas) would be well worth a second look if encountered in a suitably sinful club.

After Pilgrim is consigned to prison in Vanity the production becomes decidedly odd.   As he laments what he regards as his abandonment by God film footage of the First World War is projected over his head.   Is this some kind of nod to RVW’s own war service?   A (somewhat hackneyed) image of horror?   Then he remembers that he has the Key of Promise, opens his cell door and gets away.   On the road again, he meets a Woodcutter Boy. Or at least that’s what the casting and programme synopsis says, but the part is clearly cast as female -the libretto as projected in the surtitles clearly says “she” and Pilgrim even enjoys a little gentle flirtation with her.   He encounters the affected and spiritually luke-warm Mr and Mrs By-Ends in the only piece of comedy in the piece.  Then, as the libretto has him heading for the Delectable Mountains, the stage action sees him recaptured and put back in prison (no Key of Promise to get him out this time, it seems).  The scene in which the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains offer him comfort and calm is played out in the condemned cell, with the shepherds sung by the priest, lawyer and doctor who are present to oversee his execution.  The opera climaxes with Pilgrim ascending a staircase to an electric chair; as the music celebrates his entry into the City of Salvation he is executed- then, resuming the identity of Bunyan, returns to his cell to complete his book.

My first thought when watching this was that this was at best a rather tasteless reading of the libretto, at worst a downright offensive undercutting of Bunyan (and indeed RVW)’s intentions.  My second thought, about five minutes later and still watching the piece, was to wonder if Oida was actually playing a very clever game indeed by making the audience interrogate their own presuppositions and look at things in the way their 17^th century ancestors might have done.  At first sight (and hearing) it seems incongruous to hear the music and words given to the Shepherds, full of comfort and consolation and hope, allocated to authority figures dealing with a prisoner facing execution, whom 21^st century Western cultural attitudes would view in a pretty negative light if they took such a line.   This, however, was not at all the view that 17^th century people took of such matters (nor, I suspect, the view that would be taken in many contemporary cultures in, say, Africa or Asia).   In Bunyan’s day it would have been generally accepted that spiritual comfort offered to a condemned man was totally valid and potentially highly effective if the recipient took up what was on offer.    Indeed a condemned man who made a “good end” potentially stood closer to God and to salvation than most of those who turned out to see him executed- after the model of Gestas, Demas’ Good counterpart on the cross, who was assured of immediate entry into Heaven because of his faith in Jesus.   Maybe I’m being too clever here and projecting my own historical knowledge on to the staging- I hope not, though, because otherwise the staging is a travesty of both Bunyan and RVW and an annoyance even to someone as basically godless as myself.

Musically the production was very fine.  RVW’s score blends the strains of hymns and Anglican church music with the sort of modal, folk inflected, material he was such a master of to sublime effect.   Malcolm Brabbins got the best out of the orchestra and Roland Wood did a fine job as Bunyan/Pilgrim in a very strenuous role (he’s on stage virtually throughout the piece).  The rest of the cast have to double and treble up to good (if somewhat confusing) effect.    An intriguing evening, then- but I’m still not sure whether I should be damning Oida’s lack of sympathy with the piece or lauding the subtlety of his engagement with it.

Brazen Images

The latest Royal Academy show goes by the very simple name of “Bronze”.   A pedant might argue that this slightly infringes the Trades Descriptions Act as careful examination of the catalogue shows that some of the items in the exhibition are, in fact, brass or some other copper alloy rather than bronze in the proper metallurgical sense of the term.    I suppose a more accurate name might be “150-odd beautiful objects that happen to be made of bronze and other copper alloys”, but that would hardly have pulled in the crowds.

As the above suggests, this is very much a high level survey based on the artistic use of a specific material- bronze and related copper alloys- across cultures and covering some four thousand years.   Apparently it had to be put together in a hurry when a planned show majoring on the role of Syria as an artistic and cultural crossroads was pulled as the first shots of that country’s descent into chaos were heard.   This rather fraught genesis isn’t obvious; the exhibition has managed to gather top quality material from museums and galleries from all round the world (Italian collections have been particularly generous in this regard, as has the National Gallery in Lagos).   

The show is laid out by theme rather than, say, chronologically or by region.  The themes, however, are very broad and clearly overlap (in the sense that quite a few items could easily figure in more than one gallery)- “Animals”, “Figures”, “Objects”, “Gods” and so on.   This creates some nice juxtapositions across the centuries and cultures, particularly in the animal section, with slightly dopey looking lions (or are they leopards?) from Benin looking hungrily across the gallery at Giambologna’s strutting turkey while Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider crawls malevolently up the wall.   A strange attenuated figure from an Etruscan tomb stands alongside a similarly elongated Giacometti created some 2500 years later.   The wonderfully expressive portrait of King Seuthes III of Thrace dating from around 300BC (see above) looks slightly wistfully at Georg Petel’s impossibly pompous and triumphalist depiction of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden- in turn flanked by a much smaller bust of Charles I, looking edgy and harassed.

This approach could also be seen as a clever way of making artistic bronze work look a little more universal in human cultural expression than it actually is.   Obviously the early Americas and Oceania are out of the frame as neither region went in for bronze casting.   All the items from Sub-Saharan Africa come from a limited range of West African cultures in the Niger Delta.  A strong focus on figurative works (for which bronze is indeed a wonderful medium) leads to the Islamic world being somewhat under-represented.    Areas not blessed with the right mix of mineral deposits or isolated from trade routes which would have enabled them to overcome this problem are obviously also excluded.    One can play endless “spot the gaps” games even within regions which are represented.  Coverage of China is oddly patchy (some items from the very earliest semi-mythical Shang dynasty back around 1500 BC, a few very Indian-inflected Buddhist items linked to Tantric Tibetan cults in vogue under the Ming dynasty around 1500 CE and not much from the intervening three thousand years).   The Egypt of the Pharaohs comes down to one cat.    In the end however one has to take the selection at face value; this isn’t really an encyclopaedic view of every way bronze has ever been used for artistic purposes anywhere on Earth but rather a very general overview of certain artistic uses of the material.

Indeed I wonder if the show might have held together even better if it had explicitly focused on figural depictions; the “Objects” section is the most random element in what could be seen as a pretty random show.   Its primary focus (particularly for pre-modern cultures) seems to be mostly on items which had some kind of ritual significance- for instance the famous Battersea shield fished out of the Thames in 19^th century is now assumed to be a ritual deposit as there is no evidence it ever saw combat.  On that basis I’d have liked to see a few classic European Bronze Age socket axe heads to play off the ancient Chinese axes included in the show- the argument now seems to be that many of the ones which have been found in archaeological contexts may have been as much ritual items used to display power as practical tools for cutting down trees or weapons for use in combat.  

To its credit the exhibition devotes one gallery to illustrating the techniques of bronze making and bronze casting.  This brings home just what a mysterious and even magical process this can be even in contemporary environments; no wonder many cultures regarded metal workers as special people with closer links to the gods than the average mortal.  No doubt metal workers were not backward in cultivating this aura by ensuring that their trade secrets were well kept- and no doubt they prayed especially hard to their gods when doing something complex in case it went horribly wrong and damaged their reputation.   The show also encourages a degree of engagement with the tactile aspects of bronze by providing replicas of some of the smaller items on display for the visitor to handle.  Sadly one isn’t encouraged to take this approach with the main exhibits even though it’s clear that some of them must be used to this treatment- the wonderful 17^th century “Piglet” (in fact a massive boar) from Florence shows clear signs of regular stroking of his snout (as well as other parts of his anatomy….).   Bronze is such a wonderfully tactile material that this is a real loss.

It’s almost impossible to produce a very structured review of this kind of show.  I’m going to post a number of favourite pieces on my Flickr site (which is probably how most readers get to this blob anyway) so I’ll simply pursue one aspect which struck me when looking at the show.

Bronze is both very durable and terribly vulnerable as a material.   The durability is self-evident when in the presence of items four thousand years old looking almost as they must have done when they first emerged from the caster’s mould.  The vulnerability is more complex and, in a slightly metaphysical sense, relates to all the items which could have been in the show if they hadn’t been lost in the intervening years.  Bronze is a valuable material, not least because, while copper is reasonably common, tin deposits are much rarer and more scattered across the earth’s crust (indeed it’s always intrigued me to speculate on just how the whole concept of making bronze ever got going, especially in places where the tin had to come from far away lands like Cornwall or Central Asia).  The most convenient source of bronze in any culture which has become accustomed to its use is going to be existing bronze objects- which means that items may be melted down and reused several times over. 

It’s clear that bronze as a material has traditionally had a particularly close association with power and authority (secular and spiritual), no doubt because of its relative rarity as a material and the artist’s need for a certain amount of infrastructure to undertake work on any scale in the medium.  This close association with power and authority can have ambiguous consequences here- the great and powerful may be able to demand that they are memorialised in bronze but their statues are vulnerable to regime change and bronze can be a great deal easier to break up and dispose of than, say, marble (Eisenstein played up that image when mythologizing the 1917 Revolution on film, echoed, perhaps unconsciously, by the Hungarians in 1956 when they made short work of the massive bronze statue of Stalin in Budapest).   From the 15^th to the early 19^th century bronze objects were especially vulnerable because bronze guns were for many years the best artillery pieces available and statues or church bells might be melted down for conversion into armaments in times of crisis.    Other factors could place bronze monuments in danger.  The exhibition includes a number of exquisite mourning figures (“pleurants” in the jargon) from the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon, second wife of Charles the Bold, the last Valois Duke of Burgundy.  These originally decorated her tomb in Antwerp Cathedral but were looted when the tomb was smashed up by Protestant Iconoclasts in a surge of image breaking in 1566.   They (or at least some of them) appear to have survived, perhaps because they weren’t explicitly devotional images, but were stolen and re-emerged many years later in the modern Netherlands.   It’s not clear, however, just how many items may have vanished into the furnaces of gun founders or other utilitarian users of bronze in that crisis- itself just one of many across the bronze-using world which might see yesterday’s cherished item lined up for conversion into something else

Losses to the furnace can however be compensated elsewhere, as the (admittedly fragmentary) statue which opens the exhibition shows (see below).  It’s a dancing maenad (a follower of Dionysus, god of wine).   This is Greek in origin and dates from perhaps some time in the 4^th century BC and was found by Sicilian fishermen under the sea as recently as 1989.   It was salvaged, subjected to conservation measures and now lives in a museum in a small Sicilian town.   Evidently the surviving piece was just part of a much bigger ensemble (which must have been quite something).   When it went into the sea and under what circumstances are unclear.  It might have been on a ship which went down off the Sicilian coast- or it may have been thrown overboard in a storm to lighten ship in a storm.   It may have gone into the sea not long after it was cast or it may have been just one part of the insatiable Roman appetite for Greek art which saw massive displacements and relocations of pieces in the years after 150 BC.    It is just part of an ongoing situation in which advances in marine archaeology are allowing the recovery of lots of items lost in transit between the Greek speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean, with a corresponding rewriting of our knowledge of classical Greek art.

There is much more that could be said- every item has a fascinating story of its own.    I won't even draw too much attention to the presence of one of the iconic artefacts of Italain Futurism in the show.... Perhaps the best thing any readers can do if they’re anywhere near London is try to see this exhibition before it closes in early December.

.