Pictures in Powell

Jenkins, entering the church that served as the company’s billet, “followed Kedward through the forbidding portals of Sardis — one of the Seven Churches of Asia, I recollected — immediately entering a kind of a cave, darker than the streets, although a shade warmer. … It was not easy to discern what lay about us in a Daumier world of threatening, fiercely slanted shadows, in the midst of which two feeble jets of bluish gas, from which the pungent smell came, gave irregular, ever-changing contours to the amorphous mass of foggy cubes and pyramids.” [VB 8/4]

The Third Class Carriage Honoré Daumier, 1864
oil on canvas, 26 x 36 in
The Metropolitan Museum
photo in public domain from Wikipedia.org

Honoré Daumier (French, 1808-1879) is perhaps most famous for his caricatures, but he was a prolific painter, draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor, producing over 6000 works. There are extensive compendia of his art available on the Web  (The Daumier Register). We have chosen to show The Third Class Carriage, rather than a church scene or a building interior, because it shows not only Daumier’s mastery of shadows but also the grimness that Jenkins experienced.

The reference to Sardis comes from the Book of Revelation 1:11; Jesus says, “Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.” These places became known as the Seven Churches of Asia; here “churches” refers to communities of believers, rather than to buildings.

Excavation of Synagogue
Sardis
 photo from forumancientcoins.com

Sardis, in Asia Minor, was the capital of Lydia, inhabited from at least the seventh century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D., and today the site of ruins and modern archeological excavation.

Jenkins begins The Valley of Bones (VB) with his Welsh regiment in a seaside village in Wales. He describes the setting: “The streets, built at constantly changing levels, were not without a bleak charm, an illusion of tramping through Greco’s Toledo in winter, or one of those castellated townships of Tuscany, represented without great regard for perspective in the background of quattrocento portraits.” [VB 6/2]

View of Toledo
El Greco (1597-8)
oil on canvas, 48 x 43 in
Metropolitan Museum of Art
photo in public domain from Wikipedia.org

El Greco (1541-1613) was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Iraklion, Crete. He trained in Venice and Rome but spent most of his career in Toledo, Spain. He was best known for his portraits, and  View of Toledo is his sole surviving landscape, which is not surprising since landscape painting was not in favor in seventeenth century Spain. He painted not for realism but for mood, conveying the threat of a coming storm (Zappella, khanacademy.org), an apt image at the beginning of the three volumes of Dance that cover the years of the War. El Greco started painting in a flat Byzantine tradition, which may help explain any liberties that he took with perspective.

The Agony in the Garden (right panel of the predella of the San Zeno Altarpiece, 1455)
Andrea Mantegna, 1458-1460
tempera on panel, 25 x 32 in
National Gallery, London
photo in public domain from the Yorck project via Wikimedia.org.

Mastery of perspective long preceded El Greco. Masaccio (Italian 1401-1428) managed coherent depictions of space using linear perspective early in the quattrocento, and after Brunelleschi’s demonstrations of the geometrical basis of linear perspective mid-century, most Italian painting had lost that wobbly charm that Nick sees in the Welsh seaside village.   At the same time, Italian portraits of single individuals posed in front of distant views of their domains only came into popularity late in the 15th century.  We could find no example of a castellated township of Tuscany in a quattrocento portrait, with or without “great regard for perspective.”  So probably Powell has inadvertently caused Nick to conflate two periods in Italian art history here.  No matter, this Agony in the Garden by Andrea Mantegna (Italian 1431-1506) is an apt example of the effect Nick is thinking of.  The castellated township here is meant to represent Jerusalem, and its internal perspective is pretty convincing, but it is seen from a point of view different from the several other points of view that Mantegna uses in this painting’s areas of interest.  Brunelleschi had already shown that a convincing spatial effect was predicated on a single point of view, but Mantegna seems not to have consolidated an understanding of that concept in this painting.  Perhaps at the time Mantega completed this painting Brunelleschi’s revelations had not quite made their way from Florence to the Veneto, where Mantegna lived and worked, but Mantegna had surely become one of the great masters of naturalistic perspective by the end of his productive life.

Jenkins visits the aging General Conyers. “His face had become ever more aquiline and ivory, the underlying structure of bone and muscle, accentuated by age, giving him an other-worldliness of expression…. At the same time there was a restless strength, a rhythm, about his movements that made one think of the Michelangelo figures in the Sistine Chapel. The Cumaean Sybil with a neat moustache attached?” [TKO 211/209]

Michelangelo (1475-1564), one of the leading masters of the Italian Renaissance, needs little introduction. Between 1508 and 1512 he painted hundreds of figures on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, figures remarkable for their dynamic portrayals of human anatomy. Powell has written that in Britain in the 1920s and 30s, Michelangelo was somewhat out of fashion; his bodies had a “disagreeable sculptural romanticism.” [SPA 177]

The Cumaean Sibyl
Michelangelo 1508-1512
fresco
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, The Vatican
photo in public domain from Wikimedia.org

The sibyls were soothsayers of Greek and Roman myth. Michelangelo showed 12 portraits of those who had predicted the Coming of Christ, intermingling Old Testament Prophets and the sibyls.  The sibyl at Cumae, a Greek colony near Naples, had rejected advances of Apollo; in response he gave her eternal life but not eternal beauty (Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV:101-153), which explains why her aged face might resemble General Conyers.

After watching General Conyers move, Jenkins refines the metaphor. “All at once he leant forward, turning with one arm over the back of his chair, his head slightly bent, pointing to another picture hanging on the wall. I saw he was an unbeard Jehovah inspiring life into Adam through an extended finger.” [TKO 211/209  ]

The Creation of Adam
Michelangelo, 1511-12
fresco, 189 x 91 in
Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, The Vatican
photo in public domain for Wikimedia.org

Local Watch, Reading, Smoking, and Playing cards with Officers
Cornelis Troost, 1748
Rijksmuseum
brush on paper, 12″ x 19″
On loan from the Dienst voor ‘s Rijks Verspreide Kunstvoorwerpen
photo public domain

General Conyers was pointing at his picture by Troost or Van Troost, which he had previously discussed with Jenkins in ALM. Now Jenkins sees that the painting is one of Troost’s later works, showing a scene from military life.

We will let Powell end this last post of TKO with the paragraph that he wrote to conclude his autobiography (TKBR 440-441):

“But if the consolation for life is art, what may the artist expect from life? An incident mentioned quite casually in Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors always seems to me worth recalling. It teaches several lessons: that if you want something done get the best executant available to do it; that minor jobs are often worth taking on; that duration in time should not necessarily be the criterion in producing a work of art. Vasari says that on a winter day in Florence, when snow was deep on the ground, one of the Medici sent Michelangelo to build a snowman in the courtyard of the Medici palace. Notwithstanding those (like Constant Lambert) who dislike the High Renaissance one can scarcely doubt that the finest snowman on record took shape.”

When Jenkins encounters Mrs. Erdleigh at the Bellevue, she is wearing “a black coat with a high fur collar, a tricorne hat, also black, riding on the summit of grey curls. … This new method of doing her hair, the tone and texture of which suggested a wig, together with the three-cornered hat, recalled Longhi, the Venetian ridotto. You felt Mrs. Erdleigh had just removed her mask before paying this visit to Cagliostro… [TKO 199-200/197]

The Ridotto in Venice
Pietro Longhi, ~1750
oil on canvas, 33 x 45 in
Private collection
photo in public domain from Web Gallery of Art via Wikimedia.org

Pietro Longhi (1701/2 – 1785) was a Venetian painter, most remembered for his genre scenes of daily Venetian life. Bernard Berenson (1901) wrote:

Longhi painted for the picture-loving Venetians their own lives in all their ordinary domestic and fashionable phases. In the hair-dressing scenes, we hear the gossip of the periwigged barber; in the dressmaking scenes, the chatter of the maid; in the dancing-school, the pleasant music of the violin. There is no tragic note anywhere. Everybody dresses, dances, makes bows, takes coffee, as if there were nothing else in the world that wanted doing. A tone of high courtesy, of great refinement, coupled with an all-pervading cheerfulness, distinguishes Longhi’s pictures from the works of Hogarth, at once so brutal and so full of presage of change.

A ridotto is a Venetian casino, where patrons often cavorted with masks blocking their faces and their inhibitions.

The Charlatan
Pietro Longhi, 1757
oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in
Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice
photo in public domain from the Yorck project via Wikimedia.org

Mrs. Erdleigh had been introduced by Dr. Trelawney as “la vielle souveraine du monde” quoting from the French oculist Eliphas Levi (1810-1875). Alessandro Count Cagliostro was the  pseudonym of Giuseppe Balsamo (1743-1795), a contemporary of Longhi’s; Cagliostro’s alchemy and occultism are legendary. Powell could just as well have recalled another painting by Longhi, The Charlatan.

Jenkins’ Uncle Giles died while living at the Bellevue, run by Albert Creech, whom Nick remembered from his boyhood at Stonehurst. In Nick’s memory, Albert had mythical status like “Mr. Deacon’s paintings of the Hellenic scene. Albert, I thought was like Sisyphus or Charon, one of those beings committed eternally to undesired and burdensome labours. Charon was more appropriate, since Albert had, as it were, recently ferried Uncle Giles over the Styx.” [TKO 151/]

Once again Powell teases us to imagine a painting that a fictional artist did not paint. By invoking Mr. Deacon’s style, while he reminisces about Albert, Nick suggests that Albert deserves a big canvas, larger than life.

Charon Crossing the Styx
Joachim Patinir, ~1515-1524
oil on panel, 25 x 41 in
Museo Nacional del Prado
photo from public domain from Wikimedia Commons

Charon, in Greek mythology, was the ferryman who took the dead across the river Styx to Hades.  The painting of him that topped our Google search was the one above by Joachim Patinir. The Charon shown here is the focus of the picture but does not seem to have the heft that Nick is imagining.

Charon and Psyche
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, 1883
oil on canvas, 38 x 55 in
private collection
photo from preraphaelitepaintings.blogspot.com
(There is controvery about whether the photo is flipped horizontally.)

Mr. Deacon, with his sympathy for the Pre-Raphaelites, might have emulated the work of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908), who was associated with Edward Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts. In the painting, Charon is taking an obol, the traditional coin fare for his services, from Psyche’s mouth; we are sure that Mr. Deacon’s painting of Charon would not have included a female form.

Charon, ferrying the Damned into Hell
Michaelangelo (1536-1541)
detail from The Last Judgement (48 x 44 ft) , south wall of the Sistine Chapel
photo from italian-renaissance-art.com

One of our favorite Charons was painted by Michaelangelo for the Sistine Chapel. Michaelanglo’s conception of Charon was probably influenced by Dante’s description of the ferryman whom he meets in Canto III of the Inferno (verse translation copyright 1980 by Allen Mandelbaum) :

The demon Charon, with his eyes like embers,

by signaling to them, has all embark;

his oar strikes anyone who stretches out.

Michaelangelo’s Charon has mythic proportions, but his demonic qualities do not suit Albert.  We think Nick was imagining a gentler ferryman.

At Stourwater, Jenkins reencounters the Seven Deadly Sins tapestries, Luxuria [TKO 120/117], and proposes that they be used as the models for the tableaux vivants to be photographed by Sir Magnus. [TKO 127-134/124-130]

Gluttony Pieter Coecke van Aelst, 1560-1575
Wool, silk, silver-gilt thread 19-23 warps per inch
153 x 267 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

We have previously discussed the possibility that the tapestries of Pieter Coecke van Aelst might by a model for the Stourwater tapestries. Here we show van Aelst’s Gluttony, the role enacted by Hugh Moreland.  This tapestry is currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, which fortunately happened to mount a major exhibition of the work of Pieter Coecke van Aelst in late 2014.  As amateurs with a greater than average interest in van Aelst’s accounts of the Seven Deadly Sins, we took a peek.

Alas, a close-up inspection of Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Gluttony increased our doubt that Powell actually had these tapestries in mind when he wrote the tableaux vivants scenes at Stourwater.  For starters, the tapestries are huge, each 20 to 30 feet in length.  The dining room that would house all seven and still afford a setting for dinner party with intimate conversation is hard to envision.  Then, the ravages of time, light and use have rendered these tapestries, Lust particularly, so faded that Nick’s impression of their vivid colors seems fanciful rather than observational.  Finally, of course, is the fact that van Aelst’s pictorial imagination of Lust barely corresponds in any particular with the piquant narrative of sin that Nick’s description evokes.

Once again Powell’s seems mischievously to have inserted an imaginary work of art—in this case a whole body of work—into a narrative packed with references to actual works of art.  Later on in Dance Powell returns to the tapestries yet again, and perhaps at that time we will attempt another approach to identify the sources of his imagination.

At Sir Magnus’ dinner party, an entertainment is wanted.

Mona Lisa
Leonardo DaVinci, 1503-1506
oil on poplar wood
Louvre Museum
photo in public domain from Wikimedia.org via Galerie de tableaux en très haute définition

“‘Let’s pose some tableaux,” said Matilda. ‘Donners can photograph us in groups.’”  Several themes are floated and discarded.  “‘What about some mythological incident?’ said Moreland.  ‘Andromeda chained to her rock, or the flaying of Marsyas?’  ‘Or famous pictures?’ said Anne Umfraville.  ‘A man once told me I looked like Mona Lisa.  I admit he’d drunk a lot of Martinis.  We want something that will bring everyone in.’  ‘Rubens’s Rape of the Sabine Women,’ said Moreland, ‘or The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.  We might even be highbrows while we’re about it, and do Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.  What’s against a little practical cubism?’” [TKO 126/124]

Rubens, Bosch and Picasso are likely to be familiar names to most readers of Dance, but Moreland’s particular suggestions from their oeuvres, seemingly chosen at random, are worth considering closely for the tone they set for the proceedings at Stourwater.

The Rape of the Sabine Women was a theme treated by many painters of the high Renaissance, Baroque, and neoclassical periods.  It depicts an episode in the legendary founding of Rome, recounted by both Livy and Plutarch, when early Roman men abducted women from the Sabine tribe, indigenous to the Italic peninsula, in order to furnish themselves with wives and start populating their infant empire.  Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter of The Dance to the Music of Time, made two memorable depictions of the subject, of which the 1637-8 version, now in the Louvre, is reproduced here.

The Rape of the Sabine Women
Nicolas Poussin, 1637-8
oil on canvas,
Louvre Museum
photo in public domain from Wikimedia.org

But Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577-1640) rendition of the Rape, approximately contemporaneous with Poussin’s and now in the National Gallery, is the one suggested by Moreland for a tableau vivant.   Rubens has depicted the Sabine women wearing (or tumbling out of) Baroque garb, so that his account has itself taken on the character of a tableau vivant, and the horror of the founding legend is thus somewhat ameliorated.

Rape of the Sabine Women
Peter Paul Rubens, 1635-7
oil on panel, 67 x 93 in
National Gallery, London
photo in public domain form Wikimedia.org via Web Gallery of Art

The story is still a source of cultural reference.  Picasso painted a version of the scene in 1963, now owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1937, Stephen Vincent Benet wrote a short-story parody of the theme entitled The Sobbin’ Women,  which in turn furnished the material for the 1954 film and 1982 Broadway musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” in which all trace of the original brutality and tragedy of the motif has been eliminated.  Upon reflection, Powell’s depiction of this period in Nick’s early adulthood, during which Sir Magnus, Templer, Moreland, Quiggin, Umfraville and the others swap and abduct each other’s women with alarming frequency and rapacity, comes itself to seem a kind of parody of The Rape of the Sabine Women, poised somewhere between the pathos of Rubens and the romantic humor of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Heironymous Bosch (?-1516), the Netherlandish fantasist, painted the triptych now exhibited in the Prado as The Garden of Earthly Delights. What his intentions were in doing so have remained an academic controversy for the 500 years since he painted it.  The left panel of the triptych shows Adam and Eve with Christ in the primal paradise. In the right panel countless souls suffer the torments of hell.  In the center, Bosch envisions a panorama of human enterprise and diversion, which viewers may regard with delight and inspiration at the pleasures of our earthly home, or may view with trepidation for the fate of all who succumb to the earthly temptations on display.  Either way, Bosch’s Garden is evocative of Stourwater and its guests, who find in its walls every imaginable luxury and opportunity for diversion, but also oubliettes and dark passages that lead to scenes of unspeakable practices.

The Garden of Earthly Delights
Hieronymous Bosch ~1490-1510
oil on oak panels, 88 x 175 in
The Prado, Madrid
photo in public domain from Wikimedia.org

Finally, Moreland’s witty nomination of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 suggests the intellectual elevation of the gathering, the licentious undercurrent notwithstanding.  Moreland says the choice would be the “highbrow” one, even though the Picasso painting hasn’t a shred of literary, historical or religious content to it.  It shows only five nude women, prostitutes in a brothel it is generally agreed.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Pablo Picasso, 1907
oil on canvas, 98 x 93 in
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
photo in public domain in US from Wikipedia.org but under copyright in France

What makes Moreland’s choice interesting here, as well as funny (“a little practical cubism”), is how Moreland’s use of the term “highbrow” alerts us to the huge intellectual dislocation Picasso’s 1907 painting was still making in the 1920s.  Together with Georges Braque, Picasso had managed to turn the attention of viewers from the content of the image to the question of how images are meant to work.  A century later we have all learned to use the language of Cubism in images everywhere, but during the first decades after the appearance of Demoiselles d’Avignon it was still the challenge of “highbrows” to master that lexicon.

Fettiplace-Jones’ wife was “an eager little woman with the features of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland….” [TKO 94/91]

The Red Queen Chastising Alice
Sir John Tenniel, 1871
illustration for Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
fromoldbooks.org via Wikipedia.org

This is the third reference to a Tenniel illustration in Dance (see The Frog Footman and The Mad Hatter). Powell, or at least Jenkins, makes a common error here. The Red Queen, who appears in Through The Looking Glass, is not be confused with the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. Carroll wrote: “I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion- a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm – she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!” Carroll conceived his Queens as Furies; in contrast, Mrs Fettiplace-Jones “possibly advised by her husband not to be controversial about Czechoslovakia — spoke sagely of public health and housing;” she does not speak again in Dance. [TKO 94/91]

If Powell were intentionally making a reference here to The Kindly Ones (The Eumenides or Furies),  Mrs. Fettiplace-Jones would not be so readily acquiescent to her husband’s stricture against controversy.  Furthermore, we doubt that Powell was thinking of Carroll’s conception of his Queens as Furies; otherwise, Powell would not have mistakenly placed the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. Rather, he is simply drawn once again to Tenniel’s memorable illustrations, which all but supplant every reader’s memory of Carroll’s improbable characters.

Mr Deacon painted huge pictures of the Olympian gods but shunned the “female form divine,” [TKO 83/ 80]

In A Buyer’s Market, Jenkins introduced Mr. Deacon and told us much about his art and his antecedents (for examples, see our posts, Mr. Deacon’s Pre-Raphaelite Influences, Mr. Deacon at Auction, and Sketch of Antinous, among others). For this reprise of his work, we are imagining a synthesis of works of his two heroes, Puvis de Chavannes and Simeon Solomon.

The Sacred Wood Cherished by the Arts and the Muses
Puvis de Chavannes, 1884-1889
oil on canvas, 36 x 91 in.
The Art Institute of Chicago
photo in public domain from Wikiart.org

The size of Mr. Deacon’s painting might be like Puvis de Chavannes’ mural shown above. The original version, part of a series of murals for the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, is more than 15 feet high by 34 feet long; we show a reduced rendition that is now at the Art Institute of Chicago, three feet high and seven and a half feet wide. (See our post The Boyhood of Cyrus for the story of Toulouse-Lautrec’s parody of this painting.)

Bacchus
Simeon Solomon, 1868
watercolor on paper, 20 x 15 in private collection photo from Artmagick.com

For the all male cast, we would use images by Simeon Solomon, who did not limit himself to male figures, but who was frank about his homosexuality, for which he suffered. He painted three versions of the god of wine known as Bacchus to the Romans and Dionysus to the Greeks.  We show this version with its homoerotic connotation.  The staff in his right hand is a thrysus, with a shaft of fennel topped with a pine cone, a symbol classically associated with Dionysius, signifying phallic hedonism.

About 1929, Moreland and Jenkins are discussing the role of action in artistic creation. Moreland asks: “Is art action, an alternative to action, an enemy of action, or nothing whatever to do with action?”

Jenkins replies: “Ask the Surrealists. They are keen on action. Their magazine had a photo on the cover the other day with the caption: One of our contributors insulting a priest.” [TKO 79/

Cover photo
La Révolution surréaliste, no. 8, 1 December
1926

The actual quote from La Révolution surréaliste, no. 8, 1 December 1926. is “Notre collaborateur Benjamin Péret injuriant un prêtre.” Péret (1899-1959), shown on the left side of the photo, was a poet, novelist, and, at the time, editor of the magazine ; he was active in the surrealist movement from its inception until his death. This photo is frequently cited as an example of surrealist aggressiveness. For example, Luis Buñuel claimed that it was this photo, with its appeal to his own anti-clericalism, that drew him to join the surrealists, three years before he presented his film Un Chien Andalou,  which he wrote with Salvador Dali. .