Pictures in Powell

In the supper room at the Huntercombes’ ball, Nick finds himself at a table with Barbara Goring and Widmerpool, “in the corner underneath a picture of Murillo’s school in which peasant boys played with a calf.”  (BM 73/67)  The Murillo in question is Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), one of the most influential painters of the Spanish Baroque period.

The Immaculate Conception of the Venerable Ones
Bartolome Esteban Murillo ~1678
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado
photo in public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Murillo is a favorite son of Seville, and the term “school of Seville” is virtually synonomous with “school of Murillo.” He is most often identified with the dreamy, ornate religiosity of his most famous paintings, such as this “Immaculate Conception of the Venerable Ones” of 1678, now in the Prado. 

Somewhat less well-known than Murillo’s religious paintings are his many scenes contemporary peasants, largely done early in his career.  These are unsentimental, non-judgemental windows into the life of the streets in 17^th century Seville, and they are part of a social realist strain of Spanish painting famously found in the work of Velasquez and later in that of Goya.  In the last half of the 19^th century that social realism was rediscovered and repurposed by Eduard Manet and other French modernists, who rekindled widespread interest in the masters of the Spanish Baroque, Murillo included.

Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon
Bartolome Esteban Murillo ~1650
oil on canvas
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
photo in public domain from Wikimedia Commons

We can find no specific examples of a painting of boys playing with a calf by Murillo or a painter in the school of Murillo, but this reproduction of Murillo’s “Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon” might give an idea of the unromantic character of these genre paintings.  Perhaps this is another of Powell’s inventions of a fictitious work by an historical artist, of which several examples exist in Dance. In any case, we couldn’t help noticing that Powell’s phrase “boys playing with a calf” prefigures the imminent fate of that calf Widmerpool in the hands of Barbara Goring.

Rosy Manasch is talking to Jenkins, while sitting out a dance. Suddenly, Widermerpool stumbles over her foot on his way upstairs.

“‘I know who he is!’ She said, when he had apologized and disappeared from sight with his partner. ‘He’s the Frog Footman.'” [BM 67/61]

The Frog Footman and the Fish Footman
Illustration by Sir John Tenniel ~1865 from Lewis Carrol Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
public domain from Wikimedia Commons

This allusion in the casual conversation of twenty-somethings in the later 1920s needed no citation, anymore than a gen-Xer would need to footnote a reference to Elmo or Papa Smurf. Everyone at the party would be familiar with Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for the first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). This is only one of many Tenniel drawings mentioned in Dance.

John Tenniel (1820-1914) studied art at the Royal Academy and was already a famous cartoonist for Punch when Carroll approached him to illustrate Alice. Carroll initially planned to illustrate it himself, and Tenniel worked closely with him in planning the ninety-two drawings for Alice and for Through the Looking Glass, which are now among the best known book illustrations.  For the book, Tenniel’s drawings were engraved on wood blocks by the Brothers Dalziel; the blocks, now at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, were masters for electrotypes in the book.

What frog-footman traits did Rosy see in Widermerpool — the arrogant upraised chin, the bulging eyes, the failure to look directly at his interlocuter, the preposterus formal dress? Like the frog footman, he certainly jumps out from the human crowd.

Nick travels with the Walpole-Wilsons to a ball at the London home of the Huntercombes.  “Hanging at the far end of the ballroom was a Van Dyck––the only picture of any interest the Huntercombes kept in London––representing Prince Rupert conversing with a herald, the latter being, I believe, the personage from whom the surviving branch of the family was directly descended.”  (BM 58)

Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) was the Flemish protégé of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), to whom he was apprenticed as a young painter in Antwerp, and who recommended the promising Van Dyck to Charles I of England, a discerning patron of the arts.  Six years in Italy afforded Van Dyck the exposure to Veronese and Titian that fueled his unique synthesis of draughtsmanship, color and Baroque composition.  In 1632 Charles I lured Van Dyck to London and retained him as court painter, in which role he enjoyed immense success as a portraitist and painter of religious and allegorical scenes.  Van Dyck’s elegant and flattering portraits are often credited with forming the foundation of the great age of British portraiture of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Prince Rupert portrayed in the Huntercombe’s Van Dyck is Prince Rupert, Count Palatinate of the Rhine (1619-1682), the nephew of Charles I, who also made Rupert the first Duke of Cumberland.  There is a Van Dyck portrait of Rupert in the National Gallery in London, but we can find no painting of Rupert conversing with a herald.  Powell’s apparent invention here suggests the eagerness of the Huntercombs and other old families, not otherwise in possession of distinguished art, to display for company the distinguished antiquity of their lineage.

Princes Palatins
Van Dyck, 1637
Louvre Museum
public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons

Reproduced here is Van Dyck’s double portrait of Rupert (on the right) with his brother Charles, with whom he is most decidedly not conversing.  This painting exemplifies many of Van Dyck’s hallmark portrait characteristics:  extreme, almost witty, elegance in the pose of the faces and hands; exquisite attention to the textures and colors of the costumes, interior architecture churned with a Baroque sense of movement in the draperies and shadows (as contrasted with the stasis and solidity of High Renaissance interiors), and a view to a brooding, proto-Romantic landscape.

Adoriation of the Magi
Sandro Botticelli ca. 1478-1482
tempera and oil on panel
framed 39 X 52 inches
The Andrew W. Mellon Collection
The National Gallery of Art
photo public domain from Wikimedia Commons

At the dinner party at the Walpole-Wilson’s, Nick first meets Lady Anne Stepney, the unruly younger sister of Peggy Stepney, Stringham’s sometimes-wife. Pressed for conversational gambits, Nick reports “We talked for a time of Botticelli, the only painter in whom she appeared to feel any keen interest . . . . [BM 52/46]”

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was a hugely successful Florentine painter, the student of Fra Fillipo Lippi, but perhaps more widely known by today’s audience than is his teacher. Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Primavera are among the most familiar icons in the Western canon of painting, recognizable even to viewers with little knowledge of art history. Somewhat less well-known are the beautiful religious scenes from his later career, represented here by The Adoration of the Magi, now in the National Gallery in Washington D.C.

Botticelli’s fame declined after his death, and he was largely ignored until the Pre-Raphaelites took him up, at the end of the 19th century, as an exemplar of the lyrical realism they championed. By the time of the Walpole-Wilson’s dinner party between the World Wars, Botticelli’s paintings in the Uffizi were once again necessary stops on anyone’s grand tour of Europe. Hence, Lady Anne Stepney’s unwillingness to venture beyond Botticelli in her conversation with an art book publisher speaks less of her connoisseurship than of her truculence as a dinner partner.

Earl Haig Memorial
Whitehall, London
Alfred Hardiman, 1936
photo by R. Sones from Wikimedia Commons by Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license

At a dinner party at the Walpole-Wilson’s, Widmerpool offers a new subject of conversation: “There does not seem any substantial agreement yet on the subject of the Haig statue….Did you read St. John Clarke’s letter? [BM 45/39]”  For Widmerpool, who had little interest in art, to introduce the topic shows how widespread interest was in the statue, and in the ensuing dinner conversation, the diverse opinions are more about the goals than about the aesthetics of the monument. “‘The question, to my mind,’ said Widmerpool, ‘is whether a statue is, in reality, an appropriate form of recognition for public service in modern times.'”

Field Marshal Earl Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France 1915-1918,  died in January, 1928 and within a month Parliament authorized a memorial statue. Alfred Hardiman won the commission for the memorial in competition with Gilbert Ledward and William Macmillan, but controversy surrounded the project from the start, especially when Hardiman’s model, displayed in 1929, showed Haig astride a classical equine statue in the Roman tradition, rather than a more realistic model of his own horse. Hardiman made a second, somewhat more realistic model, but never succeeded in quieting all his critics.

The Spearman
Ivan Mestrovic, 1928
Chicago
photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran from Wikimedia Commons by Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence

In the conversation at the dinner party, Lady Anne Stepney says that the commission should have gone to Mestrovic. She was not alone in this opinion.  The Croatian sculptor, Ivan Mestrovic (1883-1962), a disciple of Rodin,  had combined an equestrian monument and national shrine in his model for the Temple of Kosovo  It was first shown at the Serbian Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Rome in 1911 In 1915 the model was displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and young British sculptors began to emulate Mestrovic. The Temple of Kosovo was never completed. The Spearman shows how he might have sculpted Haig’s steed.

This dinner table discussion creates some ambiguity for dating the action in BM. Many of the events in this volume suggest that it takes place in 1928, but a conversation like this about the Haig statue would have been much more likely to occur after Hardiman showed the model in 1929.

The monument was finally unveiled in 1937; the unveiling can still be seen on archived newsreels. This did not end all the controversies, but they are still not primarily artistic. Even now, some have vilified Haig’s leadership, accusing him of sacrificing his men and urging removal of his memorial.

The Boyhood of Alfred the Great
Edmund Blair Leigton

Jenkins, unexpectedly, sees Widmerpool at the Walpole-Wilson’s. “Just as the first sight of the Boyhood of Cyrus … had brought back memories of childhood, the sight of Widmerpool called up in a similar manner — almost like some parallel scene from Mr. Deacon’s brush entitled Boyhood of Widmerpool — all kinds of reflections of days at school [BM 34/30].”

We have gone from real pictures by real artists (The Boyhood of Raleigh), to fictional pictures by real artists (Lavery’s Lady Walpole-Wilson), to fictional pictures by fictional artists (The Boyhood of Cyrus). Now we have the absurd task of imagining a painting that a fictional artist did not paint.  The task is comedic, not only because the painting does not exist, but also because Boyhood paintings are reserved for the genesis myths of heros, Raleigh or Cyrus or King Alfred or Abraham Lincoln; whereas, we know Widmerpool only for his remarkable ambition coupled with social ineptitude. So, is the Boyhood of Widmerpool just a joke, or does it forewarn us that we are learning about the youth of the antihero of the Dance?

At the home of the Walpole-Wilsons, Nick is accosted by Sir Gavin, who,  “no doubt because he prided himself on putting young men at their ease,  drew my attention to another guest . . . . This person was standing under Lavery’s portrait of Lady Walpole-Wilson, painted at the time of her marriage,  in a white dress and blue sash,  a picture he was examining with the air of one trying to fill in the seconds before introductions begin to take place, rather than on account of a deep interest in art. [BM 33/28]”

The Lavery whom Nick mentions is Sir John Lavery R.A. (1856-1941), a Belfast-born society painter active in London after the First World War.  Lavery received his art training in Glasgow and became associated with the Glasgow Boys’ brand of pastoral realism, but his bread-and-butter career consisted of commissioned portraiture of rich and prominent English patrons.  In his later life, Lavery returned to Belfast and was active in the Irish nationalist movement.   Despite his attempts to learn from his friend Whistler, his society portraits today seem somewhat bland and facile, though undoubtedly competent, and his name has faded from view since his death.

Lady Evelyn Farquhar
Sir John Lavery, 1907
photo public domain from The Athenaeum

This reproduction of Lavery’s portrait of Lady Evelyn Farquhar  (1907) may give an idea of the portrait of Lady Walpole Wilson that Powell envisions hanging above Widmerpool as Nick’s attention is called there by Sir Gavin.

Statue of Achilles
Sir Richard Westmacott
Hyde Park, Londn
photo by Barry Shimmon
from  Wikimedia Commons by Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

On a warm Sunday in June, a walk in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens kindles Jenkins infatuation with Barbara Goring. “That was the last day for many months that I woke up in the morning without immediately thinking of her[BM 22/18].” By chance, he met her and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson  near the Achilles statue,  an 18 foot tall bronze that rises another 18 feet on a plinth of Dartmoor granite. It was designed by Sir Richard Westmacott and sculpted in 1822, when Victoria was three years old. It honors the Duke of Wellington; the bronze for the statue was from cannons that the Duke captured in battle.

The Albert Memorial
Architect: Sir George Gilbert Scott
Designed: 1872
Completed: 1876 (unveiled by Queen Victoria)
Height: 180 Feet
photo from the Victorian Web

Detail from The Painters, The Frieze of Parnassus on the Albert Memorial
Henry Hugh Armstead
photo by George P. Landow
The Victorian Web

Detail of Asia
The Continents: Asia by John Henry Foley (1818-1874). Completed 1876; restored 2000. Marble. Albert Memorial
photo by George P. Landow
The Victorian Web

They walked through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, a little over a mile to the Albert Memorial, completed  in 1876, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. The monument, rising about five times higher than the top of Achilles’ head, is a compendium of Victorian sculpture. The Queen approved the artists and their designs. The walkers inspected the figures of Arts and Sciences,  169 of whom circle the memorial in the Frieze of Parnassus.  Eleanor says something about the muscular bearded manufacturer, causing Barbara to break into laughter. As they come down the steps near the group symbolizing Asia, Barbara stumbles and briefly supports herself on Jenkins’ arm, giving him a delayed emotional frisson.

The Useful Arts: Manufactures
Henry Weekes
Completed: 1876
Granite?
The Albert Memorial
Photograph by George P. Landow 1999
The Victorian Web

Are these massive monuments mentioned just to orient us geographically? Both the Manufactures and Asia are on the southeast corner of the monument, so it is natural that the walkers should see these together.