"A very big picture by a man called Leighton"

Lord Leighton : Cimabue's Madonna

The title of this piece is a quote from none other than Queen Victoria and is a handy way to refer to a painting by Frederic, (later Lord) Leighton (1830-96) the full title of which is "Cimabue's celebrated 'Madonna' is carried in procession through the streets of Florence; in front of the 'Madonna', and crowned with laurels, walks Cimabue with his pupil Giotto; behind are Arnolfo de Lapo, Gaddo Gaddi, Andrea Tafi, Nicola Pisano, Buffalmacco, Simone Memmi. In the right corner is Dante."

Somewhat of a mouthful I am sure you will agree and for obvious reasons it is usually just referred to as "Cimabue's Madonna". In defence of the original title though, and by way of a little digression, it should be noted that it is a curious fact that pictures and their titles are easily separated, unlike books the title of a picture rarely, if ever, appears on the work itself and it often takes a lot of scholarly research going back through exhibition catalogues or dealer's sales records to match the picture to the title. Indeed most of the pictures known today painted by the old masters before the eighteenth century are known by titles given many years, sometimes centuries later, Leonardo's "The Virgin of the Rocks" and Velasquez's "Rokeby Venus" being just two examples that spring instantly to mind. Thus in the nineteenth century "titles" were often in reality rather "descriptions" in order to prevent any subsequent confusion. The painting by Turner known today simply as "The Slave Ship" but originally exhibited as "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon coming on" is another famous example.

But to return to Leighton's picture, the reason for writing about it today is that yesterday I had the pleasant experience of being able to inspect it closely for the first time. The painting usually hangs above the archways of the main entrance at the National Gallery in London and requires one to climb the staircase towards the main galleries and turn round into the traffic as it were and view the painting form a distance of 15-20 metres. Now however it has been hung in a room usually reserved (I think) for impressionist or perhaps post-impressionist work but now re-hung with romantic painting from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Leighton's picture dominates the room as indeed it would any room if for no other reason than its size, it is a colossal picture measuring 222cm x 521cm, which in old money means its about 7feet high by 17feet long. As Leighton commented to a friend when he sent it in the Royal Academy show of 1855 "at least they wont be able to ignore it".

Lord Leighton : Cimabue' Madonna (Detail)

Leighton painted the picture in Rome and was unusual amongst English artists of the time in being trained abroad. His grandfather had been court physician to the Tsar of Russia and his father, also a doctor, spent most of his life travelling around Europe seeking a favourable climate for his sickly wife and the best education money could buy for his only son. Leighton therefore studied briefly in Florence and then more extensively in Germany with the Nazarene painter Eduard von Steinle. When he submitted this picture to the Academy he was therefore virtually unknown in Britain and subject to a certain amount of insular prejudice from which he recovered only slowly.

Thus it was that when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended the Academy opening as was their custom both picture and the artist were unknown to them. Both, however were hugely impressed  as Victoria noted in her diary:  "It is a beautiful painting, quite reminding one of a Paul Veronese, so bright and full of light. Albert was enchanted with it - so much so that he made me buy it." The picture remains to this day in the Royal Collection but is on a long term loan to the National Gallery.

Lord Leighton: Cimabue's Madonna (Detail)

It was a wonderful experience to examine it closely; it really is an extraordinary piece of work particularly when one remembers that it was the first work Leighton had exhibited in England and he was only 25 years of age at the time. Given that, it is a remarkably mature work and one which was to set the stage for Leighton's career. Over the years he produced a big set piece procession picture of this sort roughly every decade, the last being the magnificent "Captive Andromache" which now hangs in Manchester City Art Gallery and is the key work of the latter part of his career just as the "Cimabue" is of the early part.

Lord Leighton: Captive Andromache



Lord Leighton: Cimabue's Madonna (Detail)

As the long title explains the picture shows an event narrated by Giorgio Vasari in his celebrated mid 16th century work "The Lives of the Painters" when the people of Florence were so enamoured of the seemingly miraculous work by Cimabue that they went en fete and carried the picture now known as the "Rucellai Madonna" to its resting place in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Leighton depicts many of the famous personalities of that time. Cimabue himself is the slightly isolated figure in white in the centre, the young boy with him is Giotto who would surpass him as the great genius of the age. Dante looks on from the edge of the picture, fittingly. as he remarked on this passing of the torch of fame from one to the other in his great work the Comedy.

 





Lord Leighton Cimabue's Madonna (Detail showing Dante)


 

The determination of Leighton to make a sensation with this picture is obvious. Not just its size but its glorious colour mark it out as exceptional. Close to one can fully appreciate the individualised heads of all the characters and the beautifully painted draperies and accessories. Originally the figures moved continuously from the right to the left of the picture but when it was nearly complete and two years labour had been spent on it, it was suggested to Leighton that frieze like composition was a bit static and laborious. After some consideration Leighton concurred and wiped out the whole left side to repaint the figures turning towards the viewer. Knowing how difficult it is to change the slightest thing in a picture of mine if I consider it reasonably well done I can only admire with awe this dedication to the pursuit of perfection, a dedication which Leighton pursued throughout his career.

 

Lord Leighton: Cimabue's Madonna (Detail)

I don't know if the picture's new position is permanent or only temporary. It has been replaced in its original place by a work by Puvis de Chavannes "The beheading of John the Baptist" a smaller but still very striking piece. Undoubtedly it will enable more people to see it and appreciate Leighton's talent, he is still under appreciated even in this country and even more so abroad. Ironically a man who struggled to win acceptance in England in his lifetime because of his foreign education and training is now seen as archetypically English and amongst European art lovers that can still be a term of criticism.  However as always the best thing to do is study the work and come to your own decision, thankfully with this rehang, doing so has just become that little bit easier.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema at Leighton House

Alma-Tadema : Self Portrait
 

I recently got the chance to view the beautiful exhibition of the works of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) held at the wonderful Leighton House in Kensington, the former home of Alma-Tadema's friend Lord Leighton. It is a magnificent setting for any show of pictures and most especially of pictures designed, as these were, to be enjoyed and admired by those cultivated souls who seek rest and beauty in art.

Alma-Tadema has perhaps more then any other artist of the period epitomised the huge swings in popularity of Victorian art. In the late nineteenth century he was one of the giants, hugely popular with the art buying public and enormously honoured and feted by public institutions throughout Britain and Europe. But as the twentieth century dawned and welcomed the rise of post impressionism and even more avant-garde movements such as cubism, Victorian art in general and academic art in particular was reviled and dismissed as an irrelevance or worse. Alma-Tadema was seen as the archetypal academic figure and he had committed the unforgivable sin of painting pretty pictures which people liked to look at and pay good money to own. He had the misfortune in this respect to outlive his contemporaries such as Leighton, Millais and Burne-Jones all of whom had the good sense to depart this earth before the 20th century arrived, and thus he lived to see his pictures derided and sold for knock down prices. This trend continued for a good 50 years or so and one  still finds art professionals with a sniffy condescending attitude towards Alma-Tadema and his confreres. But form the 1960's a few brave souls started to write about these pictures with a fresh eye, some even braver souls started buying them again and for the last 40 years or so there has been a huge boom in critical interest and financial value of these works. Having suffered more than most during the nadir Alma-Tadema is now once again one of the most sought after painters of the period with his works selling for many millions at auction. Recent exhibitions have confirmed his popularity with the general public and it is hard to think of an artist better suited to a luxurious large format coffee table book.




Alma-Tadema : The Kiss
 



Alma-Tadema : Silver Favourites
 

His reputation rests today largely on his reconstructions of daily life in ancient Greece or (more usually) Rome as in these two examples above. The elements don't change a great deal, some pretty women not doing anything very much, some marble, flowers and beautiful Mediterranean seas and skies. It has often been remarked that the people in his paintings are Victorians in togas but I don't think this adds up to any sort of valid criticism. On a literal level it is of course true, but is it any different than saying Titian's classical figures are Venetians in togas? Alma-Tadema very rarely painted mythological scenes and as his career went on he produced fewer and fewer scenes featuring actual historical personages. He was happy to make parallels between the idle wealthy classes of his own day and those of imperial Rome, and who is to say that it is not instructive to be reminded that people through all epochs have shared the natural human emotions?

This exhibition is displayed more or less chronologically and one can easily see two main developments in Alma-Tadema's art. The first is his early concentration on scenes from medieval especially Merovingian Europe such as this early masterpiece :



Alma-Tadema : The Education of the children of Clovis
 

 

After his honeymoon in Pompeii in the mid 1860's he developed an interest in daily life in the Roman empire and began to paint scenes from the ancient world, developing as we have seen the classic Alma -Tadema recipe by the 1880's. This change is mirrored by a slightly more subtle but to me more important change and that is the suppression of the anecdotal. I have remarked already that as his career progressed he painted fewer pictures featuring historical personages and this is also an aspect of this change. It is very difficult to look at a picture such as this



Alma-Tadema: Cataullus at Lesbia

 

or this:



Alma-Tadema : A Roman Art-Lover
 


and not ask yourself "what is going on here?, who is saying what to whom? what roles are the other figures playing in this confrontation? and so on. In other words the anecdotal  takes over and becomes the first point of concern. Now it is my contention that in as far as the anecdotal becomes the main focus of a picture, it  is a weak picture. A picture is primarily something we look at and therefore the first appeal must be to the visual sense. We should be struck firstly by a beautiful arrangement of colour and form and only then should we turn to the question of what those forms represent. Of course I do not mean to imply that this is a lengthy process or even necessarily  a conscious one but I am sure that where this process does not happen in this way the picture suffers for it. Take as an example Botticelli's famous picture "Primavera"; books have been written about the precise meaning or meanings of this work but it is surely true that even Botticelli's original audience, far more learned in the abstruse Neo-Platonism of the Medici court than we, must have said when first seeing it not, "what a learned thing" but rather "what a beautiful one"

 

Botticelli : Primavera

.

 

 



In the 1870's and !880's the Aesthetic movement re-introduced the idea that a work of art should be above all else a thing formally beautiful. "All art aspires to the condition of music" in Walter Pater's famous phrase meaning that music was the art where form and content are inextricably linked to the extent that they are not just inseparable but actually one thing. Alma-Tadema was never an avowed adherent of aestheticism but he was not untouched by its philosophy and consequently made a conscious attempt to suppress the anecdotal in his pictures, in my mind to their great benefit.

 

Alma-Tadema : Expectations.



 

Alma-Tadema: Her eyes are with her Thoughts
 

In pictures such as the examples above the true subject  is the absolute beauty of the scene, the delicious colour harmony of the blossom against the sky, the lovely rendering of the marble and drapery and so on. All this hits us in an instant and only once this aesthetic sensation is registered do we stop to wonder what the girl is doing and who if anyone she is looking out for. But for all that, its not very important who she is and what she is doing and we needn't spend long speculating. What may be called the literary subject is a meaning kept in reserve as it were behind the primary subject of formal beauty.  As Swinburne said about a  picture by Albert Moore "One more beautiful thing has come into the world and its meaning is beauty and its reason for being is to be".

 

A branch of art where the anecdotal is by necessity kept to a minimum is the art of portraiture and the exhibition contains enough examples to show clearly the Alma-Tadema could have made a fine career from this alone had he so wished. "All great art is praise" says Ruskin so it is not perhaps surprising that Alma-Tadema, like many artists, painted his best portraits from those he loved best and there is no finer example than this wonderful aesthetic picture of his daughter Anna. Incidentally Anna under the  tutelage of her father became a successful painter in her own right as did her sister Laurence and their step-mother, Alma-Tadema's second wife Laura.

 



Alma-Tadema :Portrait of Anna Alma-Tadema.
 

So, for my taste, this exhibition got better as it went on and it culminated with a couple of the most splendid pictures Alma Tadema ever painted. I should also say a couple of the largest pictures he ever painted because unlike most of his contemporaries he tended to produce small works, most of the ones illustrated here are no more than a couple of feet at their largest dimension. These two pictures which can be seen as a pair as they were painted for the same patron the engineer Sir John Aird (builder of the first Aswan Dam in Egypt) and offer opposing colour schemes are 7 feet long and utterly overwhelming in their sumptuous detail and beautifully delicate colour. Their magnificence as objects is enough in itself to distract the viewer (initially at least)  from asking what is going on here and just to revel in their beauty something which can't be said for the smaller works of his early career. The "Roses of Heliogabalus" which appears at first sight to be a group of Romans frolicking in rose petals actually depicts a probably invented scene from the "Augustan History" in which the emperor deliberately smothered his guests to death under the weight of the blossom.



 



Alma Tadema: The Roses of Heliogabalus

 

 

Alma-Tadema : The Finding of Moses



So, in summary, a beautiful, beguiling exhibition in delightful surroundings. A chance to come to terms with one of the giants of nineteenth century art scene in Britain and incidentally to become better acquainted with the excellent work of his wife and daughters. It may be true that one often feels the lack of real weight in Alma-Tadema, his aim was primarily to please rather than to exalt (to borrow Burne-Jones' distinction) but his pictures pass the first and most important test of any visual art; i.e. are they beautiful to look at?  This is no little thing after all, it is impossible to leave this exhibition without feeling happier and more at ease with the world and that surely is worthy of commendation. I will finish with one more image, that of a picture which Alma-Tadema himself considered one of his best, a view with which I would be inclined to agree. The modernist would no doubt call it sentimental but is it not the case that it reminds us one of one of the glories of the human race, the fact that one person can give unconditional love to another which is  never better exemplified that in a mother's love for her child? Why shouldn't we celebrate such a thing and what can be wrong with such a beautiful reminder of a beautiful fact? To me this a worthy aim for art and worth celebrating, the good the true and the beautiful are the eternal verities.

 

Alma-Tadema : An Earthly Paradise
 





W.S. Spanton "An Art Student and his Teachers in the Sixties"

Like all decent people I love to rummage through second hand bookshops and there is a lovely little one in Bridport on the Dorset coast which I know well and in which I have found several gems, not least William Gaunt's classic "A Pre-Raphaelite Dream" which was at least partly responsible for confirming my love for the art and artists of that period. On my last trip down I discovered a little book by someone whose name I had never come across before W.S. Spanton, called "An Art Student and his Teachers in the Sixties". For reasons which never become entirely clear there was a well-known photograph of Millais dressed as Dante on the cover and this, supported by a quick flick through re-assured me that "the Sixties" were indeed the 1860's and not the decade of my birth, which (apart from that fact) has little or no cultural interest for me.

It is a curious little book which has the feel of something dictated over the course of a couple of summer afternoons and then published without further reflection or editing. It starts without any preamble and not the slightest attempt to set any scene, I give the first sentence in full: "Having shown some taste and more fancy for drawing, I was allowed by my parents to study as an artist" and we are into a couple of pages about his interest in art as a teenager and then, having failed to get into the Academy schools it was off in 1862 at the age of 17 to Heatherleys' School  in Newman Street one of the best known establishments which acted as a sort of prep school for the Academy. The following year he gained admission as a probationer in  the Academy Schools where he won a silver medal for a copy of Veronese's "Saint blessing a Venetian gentleman" as he calls it, which if it is still at Dulwich as it was at the time must be this picture, now, more precisely known as "St.Jerome and a Donor".

St Jerome and a Donor by Veronese
 

The early chapters of the book deal with memories of his fellow students at Heatherley's and the Academy, none of them are names that have otherwise been preserved by history although many seem to be have been related to someone quite famous such as Browne the son of Dickens' illustrator 'Phiz', two sisters of Robert B Martineau, a grandson of John Crome the watercolourist and an unspecified female member of the sculpting Thorneycroft family, probably judging by their dates this was Hamo's sister Helen. Helen it must be pointed out in all fairness had a more successful career than Spanton acting for some years at as Vice-President of the Society of Woman Artists. Spanton recalls these ghosts from the past in 1927 in just the inconsequential and off hand way one would imagine during a chat over a beer and a cigar but it reads oddly in a memoir to discover that one Ballard from Herefordshire "had always been a regular attendant at Church: towards the end of his life he became deaf". we can only speculate on the relationship between those two facts.

The Spanton family c1865

In 1870 four years after this event when presumably Spanton was beginning to try and earn a living as a painter, his father died prematurely, and, with a mother and sisters to support, he must have had little choice but to give up this attempt and take over the family business. His father had run a successful business in Bury St Edmunds (close to which town I also spent most of my early years ) involving guilding and framing pictures but also the comparatively new art of photography. It is to this lucky chance that we owe the existence of so many pictures of and by the family, the county records office in Bury has a collection of over 4000 glass plates from the 1860s through to the 1940s from the Spanton firm as well as a rival Jarman. At this point it seems Spanton more or less gave up painting except for a few local portraits and interestingly in view of his silver medal, a fairly lucrative trade in copies. His self portrait from towards the end of his life shows a reasonable talent at least but painting can rarely be done successfully if one only has odd hours free at the end of a business day to give to it and Spanton obviously realised this early on.

William Silas Spanton c1870
 

His skill at copying may have been stimulated, (though as usual he leaves the reader to speculate in the dark) by the most interesting fact about him for those, like me, enamoured by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle, which is that his greatest friend was Charles Fairfax Murray.  Murray was a minor but central figure (if that is not a contradiction in terms), assistant to Rossetti and Burne-Jones, copyist for Ruskin and art dealer and collector. Through Murray Spanton got to hover on the edges of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, meeting Burne-Jones, visiting Rossetti's house when the owner was away and hearing second hand all the gossip and studio talk of the great men of his generation. One learns little new perhaps but its always interesting to see these people so much written about in their lifetimes and subsequently viewed from  a different angle, and Spanton has such a peculiarly inconsequential and bathetic way of writing that sometimes he produces a nugget almost in spite of himself. "When I first saw a photo of Rossetti I was disappointed, unfortunately for me, his face bore a superficial resemblance to Albert Smith a public showman." or how about this comment on the appearance of the President of the Royal Academy: "we went one morning to Leighton's studio....the President was courtly and gracious; if only his legs had been straight he would have been perfectly beautiful.." Possibly his view was soured by Leighton commenting on Spanton having failed as a painter by telling him "we can give instruction, but we cannot give genius". It is via Murray though that we get one or two curiously intriguing throw away lines such as this about Marie Stillman, "my friend Mrs Stillman has ruined her reputation in Rome by running down her own work" a lesson for all us artists, and this surprising admission that when Morris and Ruskin was raising a campaign to protect St.Marks in Venice Murray "was pleased with himself for having had nothing to do with it".

Spanton died as a result of a motor traffic accident at Blackheath in London in 1930 at the age of 85, although I haven't been able to find out any more details beyond those sad bare facts. He has left us though this curious little book, a bit of a mad scamper at times and it could have done with the assistance of a good editor but anything which adds even a smidgeon to our knowledge and understanding of this richest of periods in British art history is worth preserving. Most memoirs and biographies of the period inevitably centre on the great figures of the age and it is interesting to get the viewpoint of a minor bystander as it were, albeit necessarily a very incomplete view. I would very much like to get hold of his other literary effort entitled "The Old Masters and how to copy them" because I feel he would have interesting technical insights but sadly it seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. This little book though plus a few paintings and above all, the large photographic library produced by the family firm will ensure Spanton's name will live on for many years to come.

W.S. Spanton Self- Portrait

In the Age of Giorgione, not really a review.




Portrait of a Man : Giorgione
 

I recently went to the exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled "In the Age of Giorgione" which was a lovely little exhibition but although this piece was inspired by the show it certainly isn't a review of  it I really just want to use it as a starting point for writing a little in praise of Venetian art at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries and to suggest why I think it is the case that in and around that glorious city at that time, oil painting reached its highest point, perhaps matched only at one or two other times in history, but never surpassed.

But first, a brief history of Italian Renaissance painting. It was born in Florence, came to maturity in Venice and died in Rome.

Don't you wish all histories could be so succinct? It is, admittedly a personal view, (though far from original) and based to a large extent on my own travails and development as a painter. To explain briefly: there are two great elements of paint which together provide most of the charm and power of a picture and those are colour and tone, or in Munsell terms, (which I will stick with hereafter) hue and value. Beautiful colour and powerful chiaroscuro are the two main tools at an artist's disposal but the great quandary for practicing artists is that you must choose one or the other to be your lead instrument, try as you might you can't have both. This may not immediately be obvious to non painters but the fact is a colour is only at its full, or fullish, strength ie high chroma, at a narrow range of value, if you lighten or darken it more than a fraction you inevitably lose a lot of its strength in the process. Therefore if you wish to utilize the great force of strong value contrasts you have to sacrifice much of the beauty of full colour, or, on the other hand, if you want to play with the full range of chroma and use strong forceful colour, the power of chiaroscuro is then to a large extent denied you.






Filippo Lippi Annunciation
 

Florentine painting for most of the fifteenth century put the emphasis squarely on hue. The painting of the first masters of the Renaissance proper, Masaccio and then the great triumvirate of Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli were masters first and foremost of colour. They achieved harmony in a picture and that elusive quality of pictorial unity which artists call breadth, by line yes, to an extent, but primarily by beautiful well matched colour. They limited their use of the contrasts of light and shade to provide just enough of form to give their figures a sense of three dimensionality and this gave them far greater flexibility with their range of chroma. In short they sacrificed naturalism to gain greater (as they saw it) artistic beauty.



Andrea del Sarto: Disputation on the Trinity
 

The second generation of great artists starting with Leonardo and continuing with Raphael, del Sarto, and others initiated the great development of chiaroscuro, they developed the heightened use of light and shade to reveal form. There is no doubt that these artists produced some beautiful pictures. Del Sarto is a little known painter amongst the general public but deserves to be ranked amongst the greatest. The same called also be said of Bernadino Luini, a pupil of Leonardo who in the nineteenth century was often considered to be the superior artist of the two.  He is a favourite of mine so I will digress for a moment to show this lovely little picture as an instance of his talent.



Bernadino Luini : Madonna and Child
 

This use of chiaroscuro seemed to be such a marvellous advance that all artists of the time adopted it to a greater or lesser extent with the  one exception amongst first rate artists of Botticelli. It will be noted that all the artists so far mentioned were Florentines, or at least Tuscans  (save Luini) who made their name in Florence and it was not until Raphael and then Michaelangelo went to Rome and started working primarily for the Vatican that the Roman High Renaissance manner of over developed chiaroscuro  became the new dominant style. Up till then (and of course there was no definite point at which one style superseded the other but a gradual transition)  the competing

Jack Vettriano; what the critics don't dare to tell you.

Jack Vettriano ; The Singing Butler

 In a recent post I bemoaned the fact that critics are seemingly incapable of looking with their eyes at pictures, preferring instead to look with their brains. By which I mean they acquire prejudices through the process of their "education" (I put this word in inverted commas because it ought to mean, to draw out, whereas in fact the education of a modern art critic is far more concerned with stuffing in all sorts of approved and sanctioned opinions about what is and what is not acceptable). Nowhere is this more strikingly illustrated than by their treatment of the most famous and most successful realist artist in the UK today, the Scots artist Jack Vettriano. I will talk more specifically about Vettriano further on but its worthwhile taking a moment to speak more generally about the way modernist critics deal with realism.  All realism puts the modern critic in rather the same quandary I was in as a 13 year old who knew I would get kudos from listening to and liking Pink Floyd but was too ashamed to admit, (almost even to myself) that Abba wrote some pretty good tunes as well. The modern critic will (rightly) praise the "penetratingly meticulous observation" of Van Eyck but feel compelled to pour scorn on "academic niggling" of Holman Hunt. What is praised in an approved artist is condemned in an unapproved one. The beautiful finish of say, Corregio, becomes the "peinture laché" of Bugoureau. It is, for unexplained reasons, perfectly acceptable for a sixteenth century Venetian to be inspired by ancient Greece but totally unacceptable for a nineteenth century Londoner, despite the later actually having far greater knowledge and understanding of Greek art and culture.

 One feels a certain trepidation on behalf of the modernist critic writing about the art of the past lest he or she should inadvertently commit some ghastly faux pas by forgetting the approved list. Whistler is ok obviously as a rebel who sued Ruskin aka "the establishment" but Whistler loved Albert Moore, who painted classical nudes and exhibited at the Royal Academy and therefore is to be condemned as reactionary. The inevitable result is that Whistler's admiration for Moore is expunged from the official history and their relationship twisted to make Moore the humble but conservative acolyte of the avant-garde hero, and this despite Whistler's often stated respect and admiration for Moore's work.  When it comes to modern painting though, and here I use the term "modern", unfashionably, to denote an historical period rather than an artistic style, the critic is on surer ground. No danger of committing the terrible error equivalent to my singing "Fernando" in the playground! Rule 1 of the modernist handbook states that any figurative modern work which makes any reference to art of the past except to undercut or satirise it is strictly forbidden. The result of this rule being strictly enforced is the complete absence of modern figurative work from reviews and general art criticism in the press and on television except where it is characterized as amateur art and more or less ridiculed.

Pendine Beach: Jack Vettriano

Realism of all sorts poses a problem for critics for modernism came into being essentially to kill it off. The greats of previous centuries would remain forever in the museums but they could be intellectually cordoned off into an area called "the past", year zero was declared , sometime around 1910, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, and art would never be, and never be allowed to be, the same again. Realist art in the late 20th and 21st centuries must be a horrible torment to modernist critics who thought they had ridiculed it into oblivion. The problem they have with an artist like Vettriano is that to discuss him at all means to accept the traditional criteria for judging art. It makes no sense to talk about his work without dealing with how he handles tonal masses, his use of colour, his method of applying paint and so forth. This poses two problems. Firstly, the modern critic is almost without exception totally unqualified to discuss these matters never having actually studied the difficult art of painting a picture. Secondly, (and more seriously, because the modern critic is a sophisticated creature and never normally lets a complete lack of qualifications weaken his belief in the rightness of his judgements) once this is admitted it is not enough to say, oh but his colour harmonies are crude  his drawing clumsy, his composition awkward, for the realist will be inclined to respond incredulously; "but here is an article where you praised Tracy Emin's drawing, or Howard Hodgkin's colour or David Hockney's composition all of which are infinitely clumsier and cruder than Vettriano's, besides, if those are the qualites you want here are fifty successful realist painters who can give it too you in spades! Where is your modernism now if all along it has been drawing, colour and paint handling you really seek rather than merely juvenile attempts to try and make us think about this or that banal concept!

Just Another Day: Jack Vettriano

The result of this dilemma is that the critics do the only thing they can do with Vettriano, which is to almost totally ignore him. A scan of the internet reveals no serious reviews of his work in which its merits and de-merits are properly discussed. No doubt much to their chagrin though, they cannot get away with the usual way of dealing with realism, (and realism of a much greater quality than Vettriano's) which is to pretend it doesn't exist. In Vettriano's case his work is everywhere, even people who don't know his name will be familiar with some of his pictures so just occasionally they have to hold their noses and take him on. Not that they deign to actually review his work, that would be opening too great a can of worms; the only time they have descended from Olympus to write about him is not to review an exhibition but to criticize a gallery (the Kelvingrove in Glasgow) for mounting one and in the case of Jonathan Jones in The Guardian to deny his right to merit the title of artist at all!

So having criticised the critics for failing to look properly at pictures with an open mind  I thought I would put my money where my mouth is and apply this concept to the work of probably the most reviled painter, (possibly also the most liked it must be added) in the UK, Jack Vettriano. Like most of us I see prints of his works all the time, in friend's houses, dentists' waiting rooms, cafés and bars and I have to say I have always thought they had a certain quality. The thing that strikes me most forcibly, a vital thing for a painter one would have thought, but a rare gift nowadays even amongst good realist painters,  is his ability to create a telling and powerful image. Regardless of how skillfully they are put down on canvas Vettriano has created images which I believe are genuine contenders for the "once seen, never forgotten" club, and that is a club of very exclusive membership. The picture at the top of this article, his most famous work, The Singing Butler is a case in point, it has, to my mind, a compelling mixture of homeliness and familiarity with just the right amount of strangeness that beauty always seems to require. Some time ago critics gleefully discovered that some of the figures were taken from a reference manual as though that fact invalidated the picture but so what,? Renaissance artists did the same, swapping studio drawings of drapery and the like, the skill as Vettriano correctly asserted, is in how the figures are used, and how they are put together, the hue and value used for them and the negative shapes around them. I say he showed a level of artistic skill in his use of these figures to create so arresting an image at least equal to anything demonstrated by that darling of the media "Britain's greatest living painter" David Hockney

The memorability of an image is dependent on much more than what is portrayed obviously. when we call a picture "good" we mean it is composed with a level of artistic skill, which in turn means simply that the right colour has been used in the right amount in the right place. That is on a technical level what is primarily  meant to paint a good picture and I would maintain that Vettriano often succeeds to a high level on this test. To take the picture "Just Another Day" above, it is made, on an aesthetic level, by the lovely red notes of the handbag and hat. Now the artistic skill here is to pick a colour to play against the neutrals which allows a high enough chroma and low enough value to give sufficient contrast but also to allow the reds to be read as part of the single low value mass of the figure and the railings. The railings incidentally also perform the task of taking the dark mass across the picture without blocking the whole thing into two and disturbing the connection between foreground and background.  A little mention too for the delicious red strap cleverly linking the two larger red masses and adding a certain symmetry by mirroring the slight curve of the girl's  body. It is this kind of judgment which defines an artist's skill and I think this one picture alone is enough to illustrate the ludicrous nature of the critic Jones' comment mentioned above.

Self -Portrait : Jack Vettriano.

This near monochromatic self portrait demonstrates more clearly still Vettriano's ability to handle values, which are the key building block of any picture, the sine qua non if you will, of good art. Judged merely in those terms this is a wonderful picture, almost Whistlerian in his handling of values and I think perhaps the general position of the figure as well as the detail of the picture frame at the top right is a nod to the American artist's famous portrait of his mother, perhaps even it is not too fanciful to read in his dejected pose a sense of self criticism in failing to live up to the masters of the past. I don't know if that is any more than my interpretation but if so I would rather praise the artist for aiming for the highest than criticise him for falling short. Because of course there are shortcomings and I wouldn't put Vettriano in the same rank as Whistler to name but one great from past centuries.  One weakness it appears to me, though I must add the caveat that I am judging only from reproductions never having had the opportunity to see an original, is that Vettriano's method of laying paint on the canvas is rather basic and misses the opportunity of exploiting the wonderful range of textures possible with oil paint, the huge extension of effects one can gain by glazing, scumbling and juxtaposing opaque and transparent or semi-transparent paint for example. In this picture for example the pillow seems rather flat and the paint, considered as paint, is generally rather dull and lifeless.

 

Mad Dogs: Jack Vettriano

This lack of technique is perhaps most keenly felt in his treatment of flesh which is rather summary and for an artist especially is rather disappointing when one considers what a master such as Titian might have made of a scene such as this. But perhaps it is unfair to use that particular stick to beat him with, to say he falls short of Titian is after all only to say he trails behind possibly the greatest exponent of oil paint who has ever lived. I prefer to dwell on the positive and an honest view of his work tells me that whilst technically not by any means a great painter he is a very talented designer one of the best at work today, far superior to the likes of Hockney  or other moderns who paint broadly within the realist tradition and frankly far superior too to many classical realists of today who too often can handle paint like angels but have precious little idea how to make a picture. And this after all is the name of the game, to have something to say and to say it as beautifully as possible. Vettriano's great and to my mind deserved success is due entirely to the fact that he knows how to compose and make an image which speaks to people, they may be songs in a minor key but they are tunes people love to whistle as they go about their daily lives and that is no little achievement and merits far more respect and admiration than the art world has shown him.

Birth of a Dream : Jack Vettriano

More on the Learned Prejudices of the Educated Mind



A favourite custom by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

During my researches for my previous post on "The Art of Cornwall" and what I can only characterize as the learned prejudices of some art historians I came across another interesting example by the maker of the Cornwall film Dr. James Fox relating to this work (above) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. I should say I don't believe for a moment that Dr Fox is peculiarly susceptible to this disease of wilful blindness but as he is in the fortunate position of getting to air his views regularly on the BBC they are obviously more apparent that those of his colleagues who have to content themselves with less public platforms.

Now Dr Fox is a specialist in and great admirer of modernism, particularly British modernism of the first half of the twentieth century and as I demonstrated in my earlier piece it is only possible to claim any status for most of the art of this period by appealing not to its inherent artistic qualities as would have been understood at any earlier period since the early 14th century but to the simple fact of its newness and difference from previous art. Less for what it is artistically than for what it stood for intellectually and ideologically. Purely artistic criteria for judging a work of art become useless, worse than useless in fact, as anyone with eyes and an open mind can see that the modernist work of the early 20th century stands hopelessly condemned by them in comparison to the work they superseded. So it follows that if a new edifice of modernism is to be constructed at all it must be on the ruins of the old, the old culture must be destroyed root and branch and the very possibility of comparing the new to the old must be made as difficult as possible. In this the modernists have been successful; even to complain that David Hockney's landscapes aren't a patch on Constable's for example is to risk revealing yourself as an ignorant philistine, "modern art" is not to be compared to "art", we are done with "art" we need something more "relevant" to the modern world.

Road across the Wold David Hockney

Hampstead Heath John Constable

Given this I find it revealing to examine the terms by which the old art has been removed from the discourse of modern criticism. Of course the criteria by which bad art art was identified up until the 20th century, bad drawing, dirty colour, sloppy handling, ugly line etc are not terms that can sensibly be applied to a work such as this:



Captive Andromache by Lord Leighton
 

and no modernist would dare to dismiss such a picture in those terms and then ask us to admire something such as this:



The field next to the road by Jean-Michael Basquiat

No, another way of telling us never to look at these picture again had to be found and it was a more effective way because it didn't appeal to personal taste or judgement, which can be fickle after all, but to our liberal sense of modernity, democracy and reasonableness, You were told that if you liked Alma -Tadema you weren't just a bad critic, most of us could live with that I suppose (especially considering the state of our accusers) but a bad person.
So how does Dr Fox justify his opinion that Alma-Tadema's picture "A Favourite Custom" (pictured at the top of this article) is  "very, very, very bad art"? Well first of all he admits it is "well painted", (enough in itself, one would have thought, to cut out at least one "very"), and he warns us not to be fooled by its charms. It is charming then, in addition to being well painted; most artists would be content enough with producing charming, well painted and popular works but none of this counts for Dr Fox because he informs us it is "reactionary, elitist, sexist, motivated by money alone and completely out of touch with the realities of modern Britain". Now, note that none of these words or phrases  are actually terms of art criticism, they might more logically be applied to a political speech and certainly none would ever be found attached to works of art before the twentieth century.  I would think it rather behoves Dr Fox, therefore, before using them to dismiss a picture as valueless, to make a case as to why a picture need be progressive, democratic, non sexist,  given away for free and in touch with the realities of modern Britain, which I take to be the opposite of his terms and therefore qualities he would require in an admirable painting. To take the financial aspect first as it is the most plainly ridiculous, neither Dr Fox or anyone else can ever know if the picture was painted solely for money. Alma Tadema operated in a capitalist society, he earned his living by selling paintings as did and does every other professional artist so it is plainly absurd to make this statement and then to insinuate that that somehow affects the quality of the work. And besides, where would that leave Damien Hirst?
Moving on to "reactionary" which the Oxford dictionary defines as "opposing political or social progress or reform" Really? it is very hard to see how any picture (barring perhaps a political cartoon) could  be said to oppose any reforms and I assume by the phrase "out of touch with the realities of modern Britain"  that Dr Fox acknowledges its' complete lack of concern with the issues of progress or reform, so how can it at the same time be viewed as opposing them? What right does Dr Fox have to tell artists they should paint pictures concerning the realities of modern Britain or anywhere else for that matter?

On to "elitist" - "relating or supporting the view that a society or system should be led by an elite" according to my dictionary. Well firstly all societies are, and in my view should be, led by an elite, I want the best the brightest the kindest and the wisest to lead any society of which I am a part, but again what possible reason can Dr Fox have for supposing this picture, by his own admission completely unconcerned with modern Britain, can be making a case for an elitist society? They may or may not be the Roman "elite" in the picture, the custom of bathing was widespread, but its a big step from that to assuming any undemocratic motives of the artist! One might indeed, if so minded, make the argument that Alma -Tadema was celebrating the democratic nature of Roman baths and implying a similar democratic attitude to public health would be welcome in Edwardian Britain.  Finally on to "sexist", thrown in, in a very prudish (dare I say Victorian?) manner, presumably because there are some naked women in the picture, though it is not, as he rather oddly claims, "full of them". Well the naked form is a thing of great beauty, surely those battles were fought and won a long time ago. Dr Fox must have a difficult time in most of the great museums of the world if the mere depiction of nudity causes such revulsion. The women are bathing but I hope Dr Fox doesn't infer from the fact they were keen on cleanliness that they were incapable of higher rational thought, for only something on those lines would justify the idea that Alma-Tadema was discriminating against women in any way merely by depicting them enjoying the water.

Here is another picture which might just as reasonably suffer the opprobrium of Dr Fox,

The Venus of Urbino by Titian

It certainly has nothing to do with the realities of 16th century Venice, it depicts  a goddess, how elitist! a nude female and other women who are mere servants, sexist! looks back to a mythical past, reactionary! and as a commissioned work, unlike the Alma Tadema, was painted directly for money, and yet, damn it, despite these terrible weaknesses it has somehow endured in the world's imagination as a great masterpiece for nearly five centuries.  I should say here for the avoidance of doubt that I do not consider the Alma Tadema to be great art, but it has a lot of good qualities and doesn't deserve to be dismissed so witheringly and certainly not for purely ideological reason. Burne-Jones once said "there are two reasons for painting a picture, to please or to exalt; the first is a pretty reason, the second a noble one."  Alma-Tadema's picture falls into the first category but that in itself is no little thing and worthy of appreciation and gratitude. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a peculiar prejudice amongst modernists for Victorian art, the reason being that it was the art that came directly before the modernist revolution and that to which modernism was most often and most directly compared. But it is sad that a class of people exists, and particularly when it is those who job it is to give a full and fair assessment of the story of art, who cannot or will not set aside learned prejudices and really look with an honest eye and an open mind at the work before them. It is not good enough to dismiss Victorian art just because it is Victorian any more than to praise that which came after it just because it did come after it. The modern movement has encouraged the replacement of artistic standards with political ones, the replacement of artists as the arbiters of artistic merit with writers and academics. Indeed it might be argued that this replacement is the modern movement. The proof is in the pudding however and the modernists serve us up such lumpy, dull, soggy pudding it really is time that we all learned we don't have to force it down. A far healthier and more sustaining fare will still be waiting for us when we recover our appetite.




The roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

A brief tour of the Musée Hébert in Grenoble



Malaria by Hébert

I recently had the pleasure of staying with some of my family in the city of Grenoble in the French Alps and of course to a devotee of 19th century art Grenoble means two things, or rather two artists; Henri Fantin-Latour and Antoine August Ernest Hébert, who, fortunately, more usually demonstrated the importance of being simply Ernest. Neither, it must be regretfully admitted, are household names nowadays, the latter probably even less well known to the general public than the former, both being overshadowed in the history of 19th century French art by ... well you know who.. but such was the richness of this golden epoch for painting that great artists abound in all areas both artistically and indeed geographically. A few years ago staying in the south-west corner of France I happened to chance upon the delicious little Musée Bonnat in Bayonne and here in Grenoble I was enchanted to discover the Musée Hébert just on the outskirts of the modern city. There appears to be a considerable element of chance in determining which artists are today commemorated with their own museum; in the case of the 19th century salon painters, it seems relatives who were quick off the mark before reputations had started their inevitable decline was a vital factor. Whilst living in Paris I was a regular visitor at the Musée Henner just across the street from Sarah Bernhardt's house but I looked in vain for any such tribute to, for example, Bougureau or Gerome.

Hébert was born in 1817 and it is his family house, bought by his mother when the young Ernest was a child of 4, which is now preserved as the museum. Apparently there is a Musée Hébert in Paris but I was relieved to discover that my complete ignorance of its existence was due to it being closed in 2004 for repairs. One has to assume that its reopening is unlikely and that its "indefinite" closure will be transmuted to a definite one before too long.

Musée Hébert, Grenoble

The house is an elegant early nineteenth century building with lovely semi formal gardens although it has been built around a much older house dating I believe to the early seventeenth century, a couple of rooms of which are preserved. Of course it is the side of the house in which the artist lived and worked which is of most interest. Hébert won the Prix de Rome in 1839 and duly set off to the Villa Medici in Rome where he studied the epic large scale history paintings of the previous three centuries to produce works such as this typical of mid century French academic painting. How one envies the artists of that epoch their splendid training, equipping them at an early age with the full technical ability to express themselves as they saw fit.

Nude male by Hébert

Throughout his life Hébert continued his love affair with Italy spending two periods of more than five years each in Rome as director of the French academy at the Villa Medici. His most famous picture is probably the "Malaria" shown at the top of the page now hanging in the Musée d'Orsay, and he took great delight in recording the everyday life and costume of the peasants and working folk of the Romagna. What a joy it must of been for painters to travel and discover beautiful and varied regional costume wherever they went! We tend to think pictures such as this are mere studio fantasies but though of course they are cleaned up somewhat photography proves that costumes of this sort were worn as a matter of course and clearly were a gift to artists on the lookout for the picturesque and charming.

Italian girl by Hébert

Moving to Paris to further his career Hébert developed a very successful portraiture practice becoming much in demand by the haute bourgeoisie of the second empire and third republic producing such sensitive examples as this:

Portrait of his father by Hébert

 

and religious works such as this even more lovely picture below which to my mind rivals Bouguereau

Madonna and Child by Hébert

Madonna and Child (in frame) by Hébert

This last picture hangs in the artist's studio, a lovely space with views over the mountains and which contains several water colours as well as oils and, of great interest to artists such as myself, a selection of his palettes, paints and brushes. These last were of particular interest in that they were all much longer than is the norm, on average about 18ins long. Long brushes are typically associated with Whistler and artists with impressionist tendencies but clearly even artists who paint much more tightly have a lot to gain by being forced to literally keep their picture at arm's length.



Hébert's painting equipment

Interior of Hébert's studio

Watercolours in Hébert's studio

 

All in all it was a lovely way to spend an afternoon and get to know a painter with whom I had previously been only on nodding acquaintance terms. Its not possible to get any idea of an artist's strength and indeed weaknesses without seeing a good range of his work and preferably under one roof, and when it is his own roof so much the better. Hébert was undoubtedly an artist of great talent
and sensitivity, an unassertive talent perhaps, not one given to making bold statements either in art or life, but a real talent nonetheless. As I have said, he is not as well known as perhaps he ought to be, he lived and worked in a period which produced more artists of a real first rate standard than any other, before or (is it necessary to say?) since. The late nineteenth century saw the last flickering of European culture before it was cruelly extinguished by the deadly assaults of war and cynicism which ushered in the new age of barbarism we are currently enduring. Hébert was a small but not insignificant part of this flickering and as such he deserves to be honoured. Hats off then to the City of Grenoble for helping to preserve his memory. I would very much recommend a visit if you ever happen to be in the area, its a great delight and what's more it is free. Finally, if you don't like his pictures I am sure you will enjoy the view from his garden. 



View from Musée Hebert