Pictures in Powell

Jenkins encounters Lord Huntercombe at Mrs. Foxe’s reception. They are in the libary where Jenkins had first seen the Romney years before.  Now the copy of Truth Unveiled by Time is on display. After Lord Huntercombe examines it, he “smiles wryly” at Jenkins and shakes his head “as if to imply that such worthless bric-à-brac should not be allowed to detain great connoissuers like ourselves.” [CCR164/168 ] Lord Huntercombe proceeds to inspect the china: “What nice china there is in this house. It looks as if there were some Vienna porcelain mixed up with the Meissen in this cabinet.” [CCR 165/ 169]  The cabinet contains both some Marcolini period and some Indianische Blumen pieces.

The Meissen factory became the first European manufacturer of hard paste porcelain in 1710. The Indianische Blumen or ‘Flowers of the Indies” were designs introduced in the early eighteenth century, adapted from the Kaikemon style of ceramics produced in Arita, Japan. From 1774 until1814 Count Camillo Marcolini, Prime Minister of Saxony, directed the Meissen works as it perfected Neo-Classical forms. The Vienna Porcelain Manufactory, founded in 1718, was the second oldest in Europe.  The company was started by Du Paquier, who ran it until 1744.

 

The manufacturers of the porcelain can be determined by examining the trademarks on the bottoms of the pieces, like the crossed swords of Meisen, which is still in use today.  The marks for Vienna, introduced in 1744 and in use until the company closed in 1864, were variations on a shield, details of which allow dating the era of the manufacture. Distingushing real from forged marks is a task for experts. Undoubtedly, Lord Huntercombe was confident that he was up to the task.

Moreland peruses a book while visiting the Maclintick’s apartment: “The life of Chabrier is enjoyable…. Why wasn’t one a nineteenth century composer living in Paris and hobnobbing with the Impressionist painters?” [CCR 108/]

The French composer Alexis-Emannuel Chabrier (1841-1894) merits mention in our blog because of his close relationship to many of the Parisian Impressionists. Degas knew him well; in this picture of the orchestra at the Paris Opera, Chabrier is shown from the back, seated in his box.

Edouard Manet did at least two portraits of his friend Chabrier, who was with Manet when he died in 1883. When Chabrier’s art collection was sold in 1896, it included works by Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Sisley.

Jenkins is speaking with his brother-in-law, Robert Tolland, who says while playing a record, “I love Les Parfums de la Nuit. I think that really is the bit I like best.”

The passage continues with Jenkins asking, “‘ Do you adapt your music to the foreign news, Robert?’

‘Rather suitable isn’t it? Now the Alcazar has been relieved things seem to have become a bit static. I wonder who will win?’

He closed the lid of the gramophone, which began once more to diffuse the sombre menacing notes adumbrating their Spanish background: … ”  Jenkins proceeds with a concatentation of phrases evoking Spanish scenes [CCR 64/63].

Debussy’s Les Parfums de la Nuit is one of the sections of Iberia, which Debussy wrote between 1905 and 1908. He called this type of orchestral composition Images and intended to evoke a montage of visions of Spain.  Debussy made only a single brief visit to Spain, but he was able to use rhythm from Spanish dances and instruments like guitar and castanets to set the Iberian scene. We will present thumbnails to help envision just a few of the images that the music brought to Jenkins imagination. (If you want to listen to the piece while reading, it is available on YouTube, like this version conducted by Toscanini.)

“marble sacrophagi of dead kings under arabesqued ceilings”

“art nouveau blocks of flats past which the squat trams rattled and clanged”

“patent-leather cocked hats of the Guardia Civil”

“a hundred other cubist abstractions , merging their visual elements with the hurdy-gurdy music of the bull-ring”

“like the hooded trio in Goya’s Winter, …”

We have already looked at Goya’s Maya Desnuda. In Winter, a study for a tapestry in the royal palace, Goya shows poor peasants struggling through the snow; this is considered one of Goya’s more compassionate and less somber works; one reviewer even saw it as lighthearted.

In this passage, Powell writes rhythmically and lyrically to respond to Debussy, using words to recall the music, rather than music to recall the images. This scene is set during the bloody Spanish Civil war, between the  siege of the Alcazar of Toledo, which ended in September, 1936, and Erridge’s departure for Spain.  Powell hears ‘sombre menacing notes’ in the music, yet he chooses to avoid darker references like Goya’s Disasters of War or Picasso’s Guernica (1937).  Instead his words mingle hints of that menace with every day beauties of Spanish life.

Moreland says of Norman Chandler, “The great artists have always decided beforehand what form looks are to take in the world, and Norman is pure Picasso — one of those attenuated, androgynous mountebanks of the Blue Period, who haven’t had a meal for weeks.” [CCR 55/52-53]  Earlier, Mr. Deacon had introduced him to Moreland and said, “This lad would have made a charming Harlequin.” [CCR 21/13-14]

Powell may have synthesized Norman Chandler from various dancers and actors like Billy Chappell, Frederick Ashton, and Robert Helpmann, all of whom could claim the undernourished appearance.  Similarly, the image that Moreland conjures recalls more than one Picasso painting.

During his Blue Period (1901-1905)  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) often painted those on the edges of society. He had a great love of circuses and portrayed clowns, acrobats (saltimbanques), and other performers, including a number of versions of harlequin. The harlequin above from the Blue Period, his sad, thoughtful expression contrasting with his clown’s costume, catches the androgynous charm that Moreland and Deacon saw.  The Old Guitarist is a more striking example of the attenuated, malnourished look.

In Album (p. 87), Lady Violet Powell shows another ‘attenuated, androdynous mounteback,’ selecting the left image from Harlequin’s Family of 1905.

By 1905, Picasso was transforming from his sad blues to the brighter Rose Period. The harlequin, standing at the bar of the Lapin Agile, is a self portrait. The Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History provides an explication of the other characters.

Later in life Picasso reputedly said, “But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown–a mountebank.”   The Italian author Giovanni Papini claimed that Picasso told him this in an interview in 1951; however, Picasso did not actually call himself a mountebank. The flamboyant deceiver was Papini; the interview never occurred.

Backstage after The Duchess of Malfi, Moreland takes Nick to meet Matilda in her dressing room.  “The scene was a little like those depicted in French eighteenth-century engravings where propriety is archly threatened in the presence of an amorous abbé or two —powdered hair would have suited Matilda, I thought; Moreland, perhaps, too.” [CCR 52/48]

In eighteenth-century France engraved images occupied a place somewhere between so-called high and low art.  Many engravings were skillful copies of famous paintings, the originals of which were only to be seen in the palaces of the aristocracy.  Engraved copies could be printed in the hundreds and sold at prices that allowed the haute-bourgeoisie to benefit from familiarity with the cultural icons thus depicted, and also display their cultural literacy to visitors.  At the same time, other, less exalted images were created just for the engraving distribution network. These images, drawn, engraved and printed with equal technical finesse, tended toward the didactic and sentimental, and with equal frequency, toward the risqué.  In this way, popular engravings were the forerunner of television programming in their ability to entertain, educate, and titillate a middle-brow audience.

 

Archly suggestive scenes of the sort Nick alludes to abound in eighteenth-century French engravings, but we were unable to locate any with the requisite “amorous abbe´ or two.”

Nevertheless, the Widener Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has plenty on hand to flesh out our imagination of Matilda’s dressing room, and we reproduce four of them here.

 

In support of the artistic ambitions of her protege Norman Chandler, Mrs. Foxe has invited the Huntercombes to her party.  Lord Huntercombe is regarded as a connoisseur of paintings: “He had caught napping one of the best known Bond Street dealers in the matter of a Virgin and Child by Benozzo Gozzoli (acquired from the gallery as the work of a lesser master, later resoundingly identified) . . . . ” [CCR 140/143]

Benozzo Gozzoli (1421-1497) was a Florentine painter of immense output, whose work in fresco and panel painting was commissioned for churches throughout Tuscany,Umbria, Rome, and the Vatican.  Gozzoli was a student of Fra Angelico, whose manner Gozzoli’s early work resembles, but Gozzoli’s long and industrious career saw him though a variety of approaches to image-making, as the examples below suggest.

 

Perhaps it is this variety of styles that accounts for how a knowing amateur like Lord Huntercombe might be able to trump a Bond Street professional in the attribution of a painting by a master so highly regarded.  Two possible models for the Virgin and Child that Lord Huntercombe acquired from the “napping” dealer are small oil on panel (above left), now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, or the entirely different different tempera painting on panel (above right), currently in the Detroit Institute of Arts (but for how long?).

But the most likely candidate is the Madonna and Child with Angels in the National Gallery.  Its still slightly uncertain attribution might have been Powell’s inspiration for the Huntercombe anecdote, and its location in London since 1945 makes it the Gozzoli Madonna that Powell’s readers would find most familiar.

Moreland is explaining the name of Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant:  “There used to be the New Casanova . . . where the cooking was Italian and the decoration French eighteenth century —some way, some considerable way, after Watteau.  Further up the street was . . .Sam’s Chinese Restaurant.  The New Casanova went into liquidation.  Sam’s bought it up . . . so now you can eat eight treasure rice . . . under panels depicting scenes from the career of the Great Lover.” [CCR 32/28]

Of course, the Great Lover whom Moreland mentions is Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), the Venetian-born adventurer and womanizer whose name is now an eponym for an irresistible, if unreliable, lover.  Casanova’s amorous schemes and intrigues brought him entree to the courts of aristocrats across Europe.  His twelve-volume memoir in French is a prime first-person account of the mores of his time, at least among certain of the higher social strata.

The decorations at the New Casanova in the style of Watteau seem fitting, for though Casanova was born a Venetian, many of his exploits took place in the salons of patrician Paris.  Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), though he died before Casanova was born, studied painting in Venice and returned to his native France to create an oeuvre that set the tone for virtually all of French painting for the rest of the 18th century.  His work is generally thought of as Rococo, a lighter and more cheerfully decorative evolution of the more ponderous and writhing forms of the Baroque epoch that preceded it.

Watteau is credited with introducing a new subject in serious painting, dubbed  the “fete gallante,” in which elegantly dressed young people disport themselves in beautiful sylvan settings.   Actors, musicians, courtesans and young socialites populate his paintings, engaged in flirtations, assignations, reveries and mutual admiration.  But Watteau’s attitude toward his subjects is rarely satirical, and often sympathetic and affectionate.  He would have been the perfect documenter of the escapades of the irresistible Casanova, had they been contemporaries.

The painting by Watteau we present here is in the National Gallery in London and is entitled The Scale of Love.  It may look like a scene from ”the career of the Great Lover” that Moreland had in mind, though it is doubtful the proprietors of the New Casanova employed a muralist as talented as Watteau, one of the greatest French painters and draughtsmen of the eighteenth century.

 

About 1928,  Huge Moreland and Ralph Barnby talk about art when they meet at the Mortimer [CCR 30-31].  Moreland said of Barnby: “I can see Ralph has talent…but why use combinations of colour that make you think he is a Frenchman or Catalan?”

Moreland is based on Powell’s close friend, the composer Constant Lambert. Like Moreland, “Lambert loved discussing painters, Böcklin to Braque, Breughel to Brangwyn,…” [TKBR 147]. Powell wrote: “If I have been skillful enough to pass on any echo of Lambert’s incomparable wit, then Moreland is like him;” [TKBR 148] However, Powell also says that although Moreland and Lambert share Bronzino-like features, they are far from identical.

We have already mentioned that many of Barnby’s characteristics are similar to those of another good friend of Powell, Adrian Daintrey (1902-1988). Daintrey’s first major exhibition was in 1928. His modern heroes were Utrillo, Manet, Derain, and Matisse. As this portrait Susan shows, he did not hesitate to use bright colors.

We are guessing that Moreland was thinking of the Frenchman Matisse and the Catalan Miro. When Moreland chides Barnby about his colors, he may be echoing Lambert’s anger about Miro, who was asked to paint the sets for a ballet that Lambert was writing, while Lambert favored his friend Chistopher Wood for the job. [TKBR 146-147]

Joan Miro (1893-1983) was born in Barcelona, the capital of the Catalan region of Spain, and maintained close ties with his native city. His work is noted for its bright colors, whether in his Fauvist or Surrealist phases or in his more realistic work. In Masaccio to Matisse, we did not show a colorful piece, so to the right is a portrait that illustrates Matisse’s  use of color. Miro and Matisse, as colorists, can be seen as descendants of Van Gogh and Cézanne and ancestors of the Color Field style of abstraction that developed, mostly in the US, in the 1950’s.

Barnby sits down and says he has just been to see ‘the London group;’ he and Moreland proceed to discuss English and, later, Parisian painting.

The London Group was organized in 1913 by artists, such as the Camden Town Group and the English Cubists, who rebelled against the Royal Academy. The organization is now over a century old, with a constitution and officers, and continues to encourage and exhibit young artists. In their early years, they were champions of Post-Impressionism in Britain. In April and May, 1928 they presented The London Group Retrospective Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries. A few copies of the exhibit catalog, written by Roger Fry and others, still exist. A number of the London Group artists who showed in that exhibition, such as  Epstein, Sickert, Lewis, and John, are mentioned in Dance and have appeared or will appear elsewhere in our blog.

Nina Hamnett showed a Head of Rupert Doone in the London Group Retrospective of 1928. We have chosen to show her work as an example of what Barnby saw because she also did a portrait of Powell and introduced him to her next door neighbor, Adrain Daintrey (TKBR 137).  The details of her bohemian adventures in the artistic milieus of Paris and London are beyond our scope but are accessible in her memoir Laughing Torso (1932).