Dulwich Picture Gallery

About a month ago we visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Anna Ancher exhibition (fascinating, if a little uneven) and had a wander through the permanent collection housed in the main gallery distinctively designed by Sir John Soane. Soane’s great innovation, the indirect lighting supplied by overhead lantern glazing became the model for a generation or more of subsequent museum designers. It was England’s first public art gallery when it opened in 1817. 

The painting collection had its origins in a project led by a London art dealer and philanthropist, Sir Francis Bourgeois, (whose name lives on in the form of the famous YouTube trainspotter) to assemble a group of Old Masters as the basis of a National Gallery for Poland on behalf of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC). By 1795 the PLC had ceased to exist and on his death in 1811 Bourgeois bequeathed funding for Sir John Soane to design a new museum to display the collection. In his design Soane included a Mausoleum to house the remains of Bourgeois and his business partner, Desenfans (and the latter’s wife) that occupies the heart of the building. For those who notice it, it is a slightly unsettling presence but at the same time it’s a grand gesture on the part of Soane to honour an unfulfilled ambition of Bourgeois to create a mausoleum for himself and Desenfans in the grounds of the latter’s home.

These are some notes on the examples that caught my attention.  At the top of the post is a wonderful small portrait by Rubens as a family man. Sensitive and tender, from c. 1612, a painting of his 12 year old daughter, Clara Serena. A sense of immediacy underlines her fragility and, sadly, she only lived a few more years. A stark reminder of how often infant mortality haunted family lives. Next is a small scale version of an old favourite subject due to its potential for eroticism and gruesome violence, in which the Jewish heroine Judith brandishes the severed head of the inebriated Assyrian commander, Holofernes. Based on a much larger original work by Cristofani Aliori, more dramatic conceptions of this story feature the moment of decapitation, most memorably that by Artemisia Gentileschi.  Below is an enigmatic composition of female heads orientated in opposition. It turns out to be a surviving fragment of a Poussin painting from c. 1529, rescued from the remains of an Adoration of the Golden Calf, otherwise war damaged beyond repair. Then we have a close-up on the hands of a Locksmith, extracted from a portrait by an unidentified Neapolitan artist, the full painting can be seen here. Following this is another intimation of mortality - a deathbed portrait of “Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby”, painted by Anthony van Dyck. The story goes that she suddenly died in her sleep at the age of 32 whereupon her husband summoned Van Dyck to record her likeness within two days of her demise. Sidestepping any mawkish sentiment, the artist shows her asleep in peace while also conveying, via the cloudy turbulence of her nightdress that her sleep has no end to it. Finally we have an entire wall of Gainsborough portraits except for a single Hogarth (lower left). The centrepiece is a double portrait (c. 1772) of Elizabeth and Mary Linley, accomplished singers and performers from a well-connected Bath family, their willowy forms surrounded by wispy foliage. About 12 years later in 1785, Gainsborough was employed to update their apparel to reflect changing fashions, by which time their musical careers were over, thanks to their marital status. 

 

Joseph Wright of Derby

The city of Derby is one of England’s great railway cities. Another claim to fame is the local 18th. century artist, Joseph Wright, whose name is rarely separated from the appendage “of Derby”. The city art gallery has a fine collection of his work and when I travelled to Derby in early August to visit the celebratory exhibition for the bi-centenary of railways, I found time to fit in a long held ambition with a visit to the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Wright (1734-1797) was a successful London-trained conventional portrait painter with a well connected clientele ranging from landowning baronets to the emergent industrialist class. His enduring fame arises from his mastery of extremes of light and shadow, in the service of visual drama, something he explored in some early portraits but brought to triumphant fruition in two indisputable masterpieces in his maturity - “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery”, (1766) and “An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump”, (1768), the former is in the Derby museum, the latter is in the National Gallery.

Wright was living in a place and time increasingly shaped by rapid developments in science and technology. A few miles to the north in Cromford, Richard Arkwright was pioneering industrial mass production in a water powered mill. Via his acquaintance with Erasmus Darwin, a Derby resident, Wright was connected with Birmingham’s Lunar Society where the great and good debated the philosophical challenges of the day. This fervid intellectual climate is where Wright found his own subjects celebrating the hunger for knowledge and the triumph of science over superstition. The Age of Enlightenment literally portrayed as light conquering darkness. Wright had followed his own impulse to make a major statement about the age he was living in, his sense of excitement at the pace of scientific advance, in painted form - reflecting a sensibility far ahead of his time.

The centrepiece of the Derby display is the Orrery painting. A small audience observes a demonstration of a device designed to illustrate the planetary orbits in the solar system. The authority figures - the ‘Natural Philosopher’ and his assistant strike poses at the top of the composition but our eyes are drawn into the centre where two small children in the full glare of the hidden candlelight do their best to comprehend. Opposite them is another observer, seen only as a dark silhouette, while three other figures complete the cast of characters. A secondary drama is the disposition of shadows cast by the orbital strips as they flicker from the sleeve of the note-taker to the cheek of the young man supporting his forehead with extended thumb and forefinger. The artist gives his full attention to every  visible surface and texture while conveying the earnest sobriety of his adult audience. The features of the children are tenderly expressed and there’s a certain charm in the slender female hand resting next to the chubbier hand of her young but portly companion.

Was there some latent snobbery at work in stressing Wright’s Derby origins?  We don’t get to hear about Joshua Reynolds of Exeter or Thomas Gainsborough of Sudbury. Wright tried his hand in Liverpool and Bath but it was his decision to return to Derby that came to signify his provincialism. Early in his career he spent more than a year in Italy, mostly in Naples where he fell under the spell of Mount Vesuvius, painting the spectacular lava flows and volcanic eruptions by night and day.  Landscape was a recurring interest, often favouring nocturnal subjects over the full light of day. Cultivating an air of respectability would have been vital for Wright’s portrait business but this might have concealed a restless intelligence that led him to identify with the spirit of intellectual enquiry that typified his times.

 

Harold Harvey, painting everyday life

 

This summer’s exhibition at Penlee House, Penzance was devoted to the paintings of Harold Harvey, the only Cornish born artist associated with the Newlyn circle of painters led by Stanhope Forbes and Laura and Harold Knight.  Harvey was an accomplished constructor of convincing figure compositions, ever alert to the awkwardness, discomfort or tension in the individuals portrayed.  Small social gatherings and domestic scenes were minutely observed and described in detail with particular attention to choices of clothing and facial expressions.  Furnishings and decorative accessories in the home came under similar scrutiny. The work of the intensively observed fishing fleet held little interest and he saw the world of the countryside through the lens of manual labour.  Most Newlyn painters ignored the industrial aspect of Cornish life, unwilling to confront the violence done to the local landscape by the activities of extractive industry, notably the excavation of China Clay and the mining of tin and copper.  Distractions of the modern world of popular entertainment and the transport revolution were studiously avoided by almost all local artists but Harvey kept returning to these subjects throughout his career.  Several of his finest paintings - featuring sunbathers and swimmers, girls outside the cinema, travellers on the top deck of a bus - were a product of this fascination.

His figure drawing was uneven in quality, lacking the bravura of Laura Knight or the conviction of Stanhope Forbes, flabbiness kept creeping in. In the 1930s, under the influence of contemporary trends (Stanley Spencer?), he cautiously experimented with figure distortion and elongation to especially good effect in the bathers painting (August 1939).  Two conflicting tendencies can be seen in his use of colour where a preference for clear, vibrant hues applied with firm, controlled brushwork existed alongside a drift into more pastel hues and softer, Renoir-influenced application of paint.  The latter technique being more apparent in portraiture, especially of child subjects.  The key element in his subject choices is his local origin - incomers and outsiders fell heavily for the most picturesque features of Cornish life (fishing, farming and a ravishing coastline in dazzling sunshine).  For Harvey these aspects were taken for granted and he rarely turned to them.  His eyes were focused on a localised experience of everyday life - the domestic middle class interior, the world of work and manual labour, the arrival of mass tourism. Inside the home he was an acute observer of the enigmatic gesture, the unusual body posture and the ambivalent glance, sometimes hinting at an underlying disquiet or noting the vagaries of fashion and the faintly absurd.  Friends and acquaintances described him as affable and good natured, though somewhat taciturn.  In later life he converted to Catholicism but nothing of his spiritual life made its way into his work which remained resolutely materialist.

At the Imperial War Museum

These are some highlights from a recent visit to the upper decks of the Imperial War Museum to see the recently opened Blavatnik Galleries.  This has enabled the museum to display a more complete survey of their visual arts collection to include film and photography alongside paintings.  A decent selection of the museum’s major paintings was supported by a large group of lesser known pictures from the hidden depths of what is a vast collection of works.  It’s always fascinating to see what emerges from a museum store after a deep curatorial dive and many unjustly neglected paintings (often by female artists) have been rescued from oblivion.

Percy Wyndham Lewis,   A Battery Shelled  (1919)

Lewis had a remarkably inventive visual imagination - his Cubist-inspired bio-mechanical figures were the perfect combatants in a war that was increasingly an inhumane  technological struggle for supremacy.  On the left a stylised trio of officers, two seem lost in thought, only one observes the incoming fire and the frantic efforts of the troops in a shattered landscape on the ground.  Crates of unused shells look terrifyingly vulnerable to enemy fire.

Paul Nash,   The Menin Road  (1919)

Nash served as an officer in this part of the Western Front in early 1917, later that year he returned as a War Artist and made the sketches and studies that would form the basis of this painting completed in London in 1919.  His experiences were condensed into this tormented landscape, blown apart by the exchange of explosive forces.  For an artist whose sensibility was largely formed by a reverence for the natural world, this sight was the ultimate affront. Displaced concrete defences and curls of corrugated iron are scattered on the cratered woodland floor, to which a handful of splintered tree stumps remain anchored.  All under a turbulent sky pierced by searchlight beams, illuminating the scene in a sickly, unnatural glare.

Anna Airy,   Shell Forge, Hackney Marshes  (1918)

With so many male artists overseas, female painters landed some major commissions recording the Home Front.  Anna Airy, an established Slade-trained realist painter in her mid-thirties spent a year travelling the country painting the spectacle of heavy industry in the service of the war effort - manufacturing munitions, assembling aircraft and extracting domestic gas from coking coal.  Her command of perspective and ability to build a coherent composition in challenging environments were every bit as effective as similar works by the much more celebrated Terence Cuneo.

Douglas Fox-Pitt,   Indian Army Injured in Hospital in Dome, Brighton  (1918)

Fox-Pitt was a son of the founder of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, blessed with competent drawing skills he drifted into the fringes of London’s art world, linking with the painters of the Camden Town Group. In this painting he records a curious wartime episode when the dome of the Brighton Pavilion was commandeered as a hospital for the treatment of Indian and Asian troops injured on the Western Front. It’s a boldly coloured and attractively naive composition - an elevated viewpoint enhances the artist’s pattern making impulse.

John Wood,   ARP in Jamaica  (1941)

Five female nurses of the Order of St John in training in Jamaica. Commissioned as part of the scheme for "War Pictures by Native-born Colonial artists", 1941

Ethel Gabain,   Bunyan-Stannard First Aid Envelope for Burns Victims  (1943)

Sequential four part image showing different aircrew at work with protective silk envelopes shielding their injured hands.  A varied selection of her portraiture (mostly theatrical subjects) and workplace studies from the war can be seen here.

John Singer Sargent,  Gassed (1919)

Sargent’s monumental picture of the victims of mustard gas dominates the space.  Blindfolded and carrying their weapons they process across the picture plain with hands resting on the shoulder of the man in front. Another line of injured men sprawl in the foreground.  In August 1918 Sargent was witness to just such a scene on a day when hundreds of injured men were led from the trenches for treatment behind the lines.  The epic scale and the cinematic presentation make a powerful statement about the random cruelties of armed conflict.

 

Paintings from Penlee House Museum, Penzance

We begin with a flatly painted image of a pint of beer in a straight glass resting on an otherwise empty table in the grip of a sturdy hand - it’s a factual exercise and nothing more.  Attached to the hand is Robert Morson Hughes, a fellow artist and associate of the painter Harold Knight - the year is 1915, the First World War is in progress and Knight, a conscientious objector, is about to be put to work as a farm labourer.  The subject, Hughes, was a Lamorna based painter of mainly topographical subjects. Here he has the air of a country landowner in a slightly oversized suit, from beneath the downturned brim of his hat he stares with suspicion out of the painting. Knight has conveyed strength of character and a sense of presence in a stolid, unemphatic manner.

Harold Knight (1873-1953), Portrait of Robert Morson Hughes (c 1915)

Robert Morson Hughes (1873-1953), Carn Boscawen (1928?)

Visits to local museums are always a pleasure and Penlee House Museum is a fine example that has the dual function of providing a lively overview of local history with a comprehensive collection of interesting paintings by locally based artists with historically national reputations.  The core of the collection is made up of painters active in the 19th. and early 20th. century, working in the Penzance - Newlyn region of Cornwall.  Aesthetically conservative, averse to experimentation and inheritors of a tradition of realism that goes back to Courbet (as diluted by Bastien-Lepage), these painters built up an impressive visual archive of the minutiae of Victorian and Edwardian daily life in West Cornwall alongside a comprehensive record of the abundant varied landscape and coastal scenery in the county. Many had worked in the art colonies of Brittany and become committed to painting en plein-air but Impressionism remained a step too far.

Laura Knight (1877-1970),  My Lady of the Rocks  ND

Although this body of work has come to be regarded as an essential component of the Cornish cultural identity it’s notable that many aspects of that identity were, for the most part, studiously ignored.  While the fishing industry was much celebrated for its pictorial values, the world of mining, heavy engineering and new technologies got little or no attention - the only exceptions being quarrying, a reliably popular landscape subject and the railways that became a regular source of income for Stanhope Forbes.  All this despite Cornwall having a strong claim to being the global birthplace of steam power. The Celtic heritage that separated Cornwall from the Anglo-Saxon territory east of the Tamar likewise went unremarked along with the great Neolithic assemblages of menhirs and stone circles, at least until the 1940s when Ithell Colquhoun turned up in Lamorna.  Most of these painters were drawn to Cornwall from elsewhere in the country and many formed strong personal links with the indigenous community, their interests didn’t encompass the profound sense of Cornish exceptionalism held by the local intelligentsia. 

Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947), Abbey Slip (1921)

Laura Knight  (1877-1970), Spring (1916)

This is not to undervalue the contribution that these artists have made to the popular image of Cornwall as a special place.  Their brushes may have been preoccupied with surface values but by virtue of sheer representational brilliance their work acquired lasting value.  Laura Knight and Stanhope Forbes stand apart in the quality and consistency of their work though Knight’s paintings have a bravura and vitality that often make Forbes look pedestrian by comparison. By the time Laura and Harold Knight moved to Newlyn in 1907, Forbes was well established as the leader of the Newlyn painters where he’d been active since 1884.  The Knights settled in Lamorna but were soon accepted into Forbes’s circle.  While Harold’s taciturn nature caused him to hold back, Laura played a full and active part in the social life of the artistic community.  For his part, Forbes was especially impressed by Laura’s paintings.  Most Newlyn painters stayed loyal to their locality a few shuttled back and forth to St. Ives where new ideas were more readily accepted.  Forbes reacted with disproportionate hostility when Whistler and Sickert spent time in St. Ives. This went both ways - Sickert especially loathed the paintings of Newlyn’s Frank Bramley whose A Hopeless Dawn was rapturously received by an audience hungry for pathos at the Royal Academy (RA) in 1888.

Norman Garstin  (1847-1926),  The Rain it Raineth Every Day (1889) 

Most of the Newlyners were reluctant to stray far from their patch - an exception was Irish born Norman Garstin whose global wanderings set him apart. His travels took him to Africa, North America and all over Europe and inspired him to lead groups of students on sketching trips to continental art centres.  In 1889 his major painting of a rainswept Penzance seafront (The Rain It Raineth Every Day), was rejected by the RA for being ‘too French’ with its subtle tonal observations.  Further humiliation lay in wait - when Garstin later presented the painting to Penzance Town Council it was hidden away for fear it would deter visitors.  Garstin’s vindication may have been a long time coming but today’s visitors have voted it their favourite painting in the museum.  A future post will look at how  local history is served in the museum 

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  The Quiet of our Valley (1940)

Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch  (1869-1955),  trio of landscapes, Lamorna Valley in Summer (right)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  A Game of Cut-throat Euchre  (1909)

Frank Gascoigne Heath  (1873-1938),  The Little Maid (1923)

Charles Simpson  (1885-1971),  Dying Light, Carn Barges  ND

Stanley Gardiner (1888-1952),  The Old Quay, Lamorna (Upper), Samuel ‘Lamorna’ Birch (1869-1955), Lamorna Cove (Lower)

Harold Harvey (1874-1941), Laura and Paul Jewill Hill  (1915)

Frank Bramley (1857-1915),  Eyes and No Eyes (1887)