Mr. Elwell’s Neighbour

Mr. Elwell lived most of his life in the prosperous East Yorkshire market town of Beverley where he must have been on good terms with his neighbour. A degree of trust is required before inviting an artist through the front door to make a painting of the interior. Looking at his subject matter suggests that Elwell would have presented a most respectable face to the world without a shadow of impropriety. Modernism left no mark upon him as he pursued a long career as portrait painter to the second rank of eminence - Brigadiers and Aldermen, Clergymen and Yorkshire businessmen. The portraits display the sense of duty and self-importance that goes with responsibility and high office - occasionally relieving the gravity with a hint of a half-smile. Glacially observed and attentive to all the badges and accessories of the great and good, Elwell certainly delivered value for money. All too easy to dismiss as banal and unimaginative.

We can safely assume that Elwell was of a conservative disposition and his more personal paintings make that very clear. Rooted in his Yorkshire homeland, Elwell’s lovingly realised paintings of local pig farms and cow sheds outshine his portraits in terms of emotional depth. Progress made him uncomfortable and he was drawn to subjects such as “The Last Hansom Cab” and “The Last Pipe-maker in Beverley” to resist the passage of time. The language of gesture and capturing movement was not a strong point - most human figures resembled laboratory specimens, cryonically frozen in their discomfort. The effect of this could be unintentionally alarming - the claustrophobic “Birthday Party” makes for an unsettling joyless image where the peeling of an orange, the gleam of a monocle and the gripping of a pipe all take on a sinister air. Animation was only achieved when there was a degree of identification with the subject as in the full-length portrait of a sturdy pub landlord or the posthumous portrait of the 16 year old hero of the Battle of Jutland, “John Travers Cornwell VC”.

Inside his neighbour’s house, Elwell discovered a sequence of well ordered domestic spaces that reminded him of the Golden Age Dutch Interiors with which he would have been familiar. His easel was placed accordingly to take advantage of the measured spatial recession through four defined volumes all the way to the conservatory at the back of the house. Most of Elwell’s major set-piece interiors with group portraits were presented in a closed box-like space giving them the appearance of a diorama - this was an opportunity to break out of the box and drill deeper into private space. Dark varnished wainscoting and surrounds on the central arch and doorframes set the tone. An ancestral portrait stares down over a display of family treasures including silver chargers and porcelain figures while a malevolent coal scuttle gleams in the corner. (A typical supplier of this style was Waring & Gillow’s department store as shown in this advertising.) A solid Victorian dresser draws the eye into the centre of the house where a figure descends a staircase on our left. A shaft of sunlight floods down the stairs, reflecting off the chandelier and defining the back of the descending figure. Deeper into the composition brings us to a carpeted room beyond which a wall of glazing gives on to a conservatory with flowering plants. The human presence is diffident, hesitant and slow moving - she holds a box and a drawstring purse but there is no narrative drive to make further sense of this. Objective scrutiny and dispassionate recording dominate the painting.

Elwell leads us into a private space, minutely describing what falls in his visual field while withholding any sense of the lives lived therein. We can infer material wellbeing from the scale of the house and the value of the contents. All is dusted and polished to a fault by domestic servants. Vintage furnishings and an accumulation of antiques would suggest elderly residents with a need to surround themselves with the trappings of tradition in moderation, a very English avoidance of ostentation. Alongside this, reticence and suppression of all things emotional help maintain an air of calm. I realise I’m beginning to describe things witnessed in childhood when obliged to join in family visits to unmarried great-aunts born in the 1870s and 1880s, whose vast Victorian villa in Stockton-on-Tees looked much like this. Inside the drapery sagged with inertia and the bookshelves were lined with the works of Carlyle, Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens and the Waverley novels, all in the minutest of fonts, and the most exciting reading material was back issues of the Christian Science Monitor. Not even the Readers’ Digest could penetrate this citadel of resistance to the post-war settlement. In the gloomiest of rooms, the aunts could hardly be distinguished from the soft furnishings in which they were sunk - their utterances were largely confined to disconcertingly direct interrogation (What do you intend to do with your life?), candid observations (Hasn’t he got a lot of spots?) or behavioural injunctions (Do sit up straight and stop scowling). All three wore hearing-aids of generous dimensions giving rise to raised voices on all sides and much mutual incomprehension. They could be graded by analysing the sub-atomic clouds of disapproval they radiated that ranged from average to full-on nuclear. Not to be wondered at when you consider that we visitors had absolutely nothing of interest to communicate. It was years before it occurred to me that their relief at our departure could well have exceeded our own. Upon which, out came the State Express and the Bushmills as hands of cards were dealt and the Christian Science Monitor was examined for its horse-racing tips.

Back to the matter in hand - Elwell, without any conscious intention of doing so, has created something of mystery that defies understanding. We can guess but we cannot fully know what it is we are seeing. The figure on the stairs remains stubbornly present, yet devoid of significance. There may be a corpse laid out on the polished floor of the room on the right. There may be an armed intruder pursuing the figure on the stairs. Or there may be a riotous luncheon party in progress in the room next to the conservatory. None of this is likely. But what we can say is that the way the sunlight splashes on the stair carpet or the mirror reflection opens up another perspective recession have a visual poetry as unexpected as it is enriching. 

The painting can be seen in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

A Visit to the Art Institute, Part 2

In the space of a fortnight in June, I had the opportunity to see both of Georges Seurat’s monumental masterpieces. In London, after visiting the Sorolla exhibition I battled through the National Gallery to the Post-Impressionist room and Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It was the wrong decision – the painting was besieged by a noisy, unruly mob, jostling for the most advantageous selfie-position. No space for contemplative response, no space for careful scrutiny. This wonderfully ambitious and experimental painting has taken on a new existence as a piece of scenery, something important enough to merit a casual glance but not important enough to be worthy of close study.

In Chicago, Seurat is a star – A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of the centrepieces of the collection and occupies a wall of its own in a place where it really can’t be missed. Once again, it was confronted by a crowd, but a more respectful audience than in London. Much easier to navigate through and reach the target. This left space to get a sense of its magnetic presence and appreciate what an extraordinary and baffling painting this is. There is no simple reading - curators and historians cannot agree on what the painting is about. Some see social significance in the depiction of petty bourgeoisie leisure activities as an extension of the artist’s earlier observation of the off-duty working class at Asnières. There are those who see a meditation on the contradictory world of high fashion in the meticulously observed outfits on display and the mannequin-like figures. In their isolation from one another, some see the figures as inhabiting a critique of capitalism and consumerist conformity. Others detect irony in Seurat’s apparent mockery and caricature of social pretension. A formalist evaluation is focused on Seurat’s further refinement of the pointillist technique and his methodical surface construction according to the scientific principles of Charles Blanc, Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood. Which induced some to view the painting as an endorsement of progressive republican ideals.

The existence of multiple interpretations is one of the things that makes Seurat such an intriguing artist. His interests include the science of optics, radical politics, contemporary fashion and popular print media, especially caricature. These are not easily reconciled into a comfortable description of an integrated personality. Given his reticence, there is no easy way to assess his character and motivations. Personal privacy was a major concern and he may have taken silent pleasure in confounding attempts to assign his work to a single point of view. Paradoxically, Seurat’s cool and unemotional paintings were a gateway for Van Gogh, enabling him to achieve greater intensity of feeling by adapting the pointillist technique to invigorate his paint surfaces and colour combinations. Pissarro assimilated pointillism into his painting vocabulary and re-energised his output in the latter part of his career. There was a large tribe of Seurat followers active in France, notably Signac, Luce, van Rysselberghe, Cross and Angrand. Derain, Braque and Matisse had a brief flirtation with pointillism in the early days of Fauvism. In Italy the pointillist technique was enthusiastically adopted by fin de siècle symbolists and bequeathed to the Futurists in whose dynamic paintings it would enjoy a final incandescence. Such lesser aftershocks may bear little comparison with the powerful influence of Cézanne but were not without significance.

We have only fragmentary glimpses of the inner Seurat. Some letters survive, plus some notes he wrote about his painting technique. An academic training in the manner of Ingres fed his preference for order and objectivity. Anecdotes are thin on the ground - he was seen at the Café d’Athènes and he spent time in the company of Paul Signac and Félix Fénéon. Friends and colleagues report a self contained individual for whom a Bohemian lifestyle held little appeal. Sober and deliberately unostentatious in appearance, he seemed comfortable with his bourgeois origins despite his anarchist sympathies. The existence of his mistress and mother of his child, Madeleine Knobloch, only became known after his death in 1891. Seurat is an artist who approached all his work with the utmost gravity in terms of planning and forethought without endorsing any particular estimation of its meaning and value. He had the gift of maintaining just enough distance between himself and the great weight of critical interpretation built upon his achievements. It’s an easy matter to summon up a mental picture of a grumpy Cezanne, an embittered Lautrec, a lascivious Gauguin or an anguished Van Gogh but Seurat is elusive. The only film portrayal came in Minelli’s Lust for Life (1956 Van Gogh biopic) in which Seurat, played by David Bond stands on a step-ladder dabbing away at the Grande Jatte while Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) declaims his admiration. Death came suddenly at the end of March 1891 when he took to his bed with a serious cough and died within three days leaving his admirers to speculate on what might have been.

A Visit to the Art Institute, Part 1

One of the pleasures of being a curator must be making mutually reinforcing pairings of art works. The pairing of these two portrait heads in the Art Institute of Chicago is an almost perfect example – one is very much deceased and the other is close to death. Théodore Géricault painted this study (above) of the Head of a Guillotined Man in 1818/19 – just 5 years later in January 1824, the artist is himself on his deathbed, where he is painted (below) by Charles-Émile Callande de Champmartin, a young aspiring artist in the Romantic tradition and follower of Géricault and Delacroix. Géricault was a young man obsessed with death and decay – he made many studies of body parts and corpses, observed in Parisian mortuaries as part of the preparation he undertook for his controversial painting, The Raft of the Medusa (1818/19), which is such a monumental presence in the galleries of the Louvre. Géricault’s death brought a premature end to a brief but tumultuous career, leaving posterity to speculate on what might have been. It is recorded that among his future plans were paintings on the subject of the Spanish Inquisition and the Slave Trade. His mortal remains were interred in Père Lachaise cemetery and his tomb was featured in a 2014 post which can be seen here.

Bad Timing

It was impressed on me as a child that complaining about personal misfortune was undignified and unacceptable. Despite that I shall tell this tale of good intentions frustrated without losing sight of the fact that as misfortunes go, this is a very small one. One of the great treasures in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago is Gustave Caillebotte’s magnum opus, Paris Street; Rainy Day, first exhibited at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in 1877. It represents the high point in Caillebotte’s output and nothing quite like it was produced by any of his contemporaries. At the age of only 28 the artist had examined the new Parisian urbanism of large scale speculative building and vast ambitious street planning to uncover the sense of psychological displacement experienced by the wider population as they navigate through the new cityscape. Perspectival distortions and a judicious elimination of distracting detail reveal the wide open spaces of the rapidly expanding metropolis and emphasise the insignificance of the occasional human presence. Meticulously planned and executed on a monumental scale, the painting was little more than a footnote in the great Impressionist narrative until it was acquired by the Art Institute from Wildenstein in 1964. In the 1970s, Kirk Varnedoe’s exhaustive, inspirational researches began a process of re-evaluation that has continued into the present and its current status as a major masterpiece of the late 19th. century seems secure.

I had every confidence that I would see the painting when I visited Chicago last month, secure in the knowledge that it was museum policy to turn down all requests for loans from overseas on the not unreasonable grounds that the safety of such a large and bulky item could not be guaranteed if it was shipped around the world. But I was to be disappointed and if I had enquired more deeply I would have learned that it had been loaned to Essen and Paris in the last decade. Paris Street; Rainy Day had buggered off to Berlin as part of a trade that brought Manet’s In the Conservatory in the opposite direction. Insult was added to injury in the museum shop where the display of Caillebotte-related merchandise ran from floor to ceiling, smirking at me. There’s a pattern here – last year in the Kusthalle, Hamburg, I discovered the object of my interest, the Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich) had wandered off to Berlin (again) in search of a better offer. I have learned from experience the necessity of checking whether a place I plan to visit is closed for a 75 year programme of refurbishment, but clearly I must take my due diligence to a higher level if I’m to avoid future disappointment. In the meantime, a trip to Berlin before September 26 seems called for. 

Previous posts relating to this painting are here, here and here.