Sunday, 22 December 2013

THE LAUREL TROPHY part four

The erotic thrills of spiritual love: Canova's Cupid and Psyche
Marble, 1786-93, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image source: Web gallery of Art
MADAME RÉCAMIER and THE PRUSSIAN PRINCE  
In 1805, Napoleon exiled Madame Récamier from Paris. He had expected her to be a decoration, not a threat, at his imperial court. Tyrants are always galled when a pretty woman resists his authority. Paradoxes and anomalies are subversive by definition. Madame Récamier was feminine, gentle and sweet, and her reason for existence was personal power and influence.

Undermined by Napoleon's spite, her charmed life was suddenly precarious. Her husband was bankrupt
and their magnificent style of living was gone. She left France and travelled in Europe as a celebrity in her own right and as one of Napoleon's loveliest victims. Among the many men who laid siege to her was a swaggering young prince of Prussia with splendid black whiskers. August von Hohenzollern was one of the few distinguished men of his family with any brains or cultural sensitivity.....

Thursday, 5 December 2013

THE LAUREL TROPHY part three


 Pure sex symbol: Gérard's portrait (c.1805), still an effective image of natural feminine beauty and grace, in a setting that evokes the drapery and elegant furniture of Madame Récamier's real bedroom and bathroom.
Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Image source: Web Gallery of Art 


The pose Madame Récamier adopted for portraits, the lush sensuality of her appearance, the brilliant brown eyes and luxuriant black hair,the pale skin of neck and shapely arms left bare, even the hint of down on her upper lip, that seemed to promise so much earthly pleasure, was so far removed from her delicate personality that it was like performance art, in the late 18th century tradition of "attitudes." 

The virginal banker's wife enjoyed role-playing an odalisque, and though most of the portraiture created in her youth exudes sex appeal, she remained all her life a symbol of femininity that could never be owned or exploited by anybody.....

Sunday, 24 November 2013

THE LAUREL TROPHY

part two
 "She was one of the neo-Greeks who rose, half naked indeed, but fully clad in their own modesty..." 
 (Arsène Houssaye, Notre-Dame de TJiermidor, 1866).  
.
The nymph-bride stands under a laurel tree, timeless grace and chastity personified, not disguising her expression of mischievous amusement: detail of the oval portrait in oils of Madame Récamier, in her early twenties, c.1799, by Eulalie Morin (1765 - 1837). 
Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et du Trianon

As much as politicians, generals and philosophers, she was trying in her own way to make order out of chaos, contributing her own sensibility of what was best in old and new, while maintaining an unusual degree of independence in her private life. Outwardly avoiding the thunderbolts and lightning of her Romantic contemporaries, an arouser of unrequited passions in other people apparently unmoved by sexual desires herself, a good...

Friday, 25 October 2013

The Character of Light

The Enchanted Castle: at this apex of feeling, the poet/painter is tolled back to “self-concentration”, and, carefully selecting the words or colours for sunlight (“patent yellow or white lead”, renews their cycle of creativity. As for the rest of us, without their “magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas”, where on earth would we be?.........

Saturday, 19 October 2013

Chameleon and Narcissus

John Keats, Thomas Lawrence and the Brilliance Feminine
Sir Thomas Lawrence. Mrs. Jens Wolff, 1803 - 1815. 
© The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. W. W. Kimball Collection.

We feed on the human drama; it stirs and nourishes us. The painting suddenly looks better. We must forget....

Monday, 7 October 2013

"The next Keats can only be a painter”

JOHN KEATS AND VICTORIAN PAINTERS
Edward Burne- Jones, Beguiling of Merlin, 1872 -77, Lady Lever Art Gallery. 
Image source: Wikipedia
"La Belle Dame sans merci/Hath thee in thrall!"

When the Pre-Raphaelites, ardently following “the footsteps of Keats”[1] away from mannerism to revitalized Gothicism, took inspiration from the fresh, saturated colours of his imagery and medieval settings, they chose to overlook his devout Hellenism and appreciation of Raphael’s “heroic simplicity and unaffected grandeur”. [2] 

Their admiration for his technique of conveying intensity of sensory experience was genuine - "the next Keats can only be a painter" observed Dante Gabriel Rossetti in a letter to William Morris - but like many apostles they distorted the intentions of their prophet.

Keats had.....

Sunday, 29 September 2013

the poet on the chain of art

part two of 
The Character of Light
Figure of Dionysos from the east pediment of the Parthenon, Athens, c.438-432 BC. © Trustees of the British Museum
"Misshapen monuments and maim'd antiques" 
Byron, satirizing English Bards and Scotch Reviewers for gushing over the Elgin Marbles

Keats’ imagination links him to the chain of art, from the realistic details of classical sculpture and drapery in early Renaissance frescoes, to the joyful experienced sensations of Impressionism, the anguished lyrical Expressionism of Munch, and the quietude of abstraction. His multi-faceted poetic personality reflected all life, sensual and intellectual, mystic and realist, neo-classicist and Romantic.

He never wanted to be part of a school or movement. He saw himself as a student of life and art, not a precocious genius: “I cannot speak/ Definitively on these mighty things” he admitted in his Sonnet to Haydon after his first sight of the Elgin Marbles. When he wrote in a letter,“I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty”, he was thinking the same as John Constable, who said“There is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.”
Constable, View in a Garden with a red house beyond, ca.1821, oil on canvas. 
Copyright © Victoria and Albert Museum

Keats, like Constable, was not a mannerist artist, excluding or romanticising ugly realities; he was trying........

Sunday, 22 September 2013

synapse

for Catherine and DvP
The first thing you notice is the astonishing blue. It is a woman’s dress, with a luminous life of its own, a bright heart bursting out of a pale pink shell, made of the same colours as the blue sky, flushed pale carmine by the setting sun. Darkling, she “cannot see what flowers are at her feet, /Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs”. She has a woman’s head, but her body looks more like an exotic blue flower, a lady elf transforming from gordian to woman’s shape. Her dark curling hair might be part of a tree’s foliage.

Lady Bate-Dudley, oil on canvas c.1787. © Tate. Her husband, Sir Henry, known as the Fighting Parson, was a loyal friend and supporter of Gainsborough; he also wrote comic operas. The Bate-Dudleys inhabited a surprisingly passionate landscape in their own lives.

Viewed as late 18th century society portraiture, Gainsborough’s painting of Lady Bate-Dudley is disconcerting, being far more about abstract colour and light than the status of the sitter; as poetry of art, it perfectly evokes states of mind painted in words by Keats.

Gainsborough was a poetic painter, Keats the most painterly of poets in an age inspired by unbounded imaginative affinities. Keats’ liquid imagery was as often in danger.....

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

beyond the grave:

celebrity apotheosis 
"Such is the power of novelty in England, that the newspapers next morning were full of the arrival of the foreign Beauty."
François-René de Chateaubriand, describing Madame Récamier's visit to London in 1802, in his autobiography,
Mémoires d'Outre-tombe,
1839

Stipple engraving by Anthony Cardon, published by Francesco Bartolozzi, of Richard Cosway's portrait of Madame Récamier

THE LAUREL TROPHY part one

She was twenty-four years old and the most famous social networker in Europe. At her first public appearance in London society, "she was swept to her carriage by the tide of people....The crowd followed hard on the fair foreigner’s heels. This phenomenon was repeated every time she showed herself in public; the newspapers resounded with her name, and her portrait, engraved by Bartolozzi, was distributed throughout England." (Chateaubriand, Mémoires)

Juliette Récamier's personal qualities, and fashion sense, reacted uniquely with the cultural principles and fantasies of her time, which promoted the cult of the individual. Like Napoleon, she was born out of 18th century enlightenment and revolution, a gentler kind of opportunist who seized her moment, by collaborating on the creation of an image of femininity that Hollywood, fashion and pop music industries still mimic, a self-made goddess who dictated limits to her exploitation. She is one of the few women who attempted self-determination in popular and high culture and....


Sunday, 1 September 2013

off the rails

Rails at Pimlico, 2007

Tuesday, 27 August 2013

The rescue

With a fearful symmetry, Bubonic Plague is back where it started, in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, reminding humans, just as the Icelandic volcano did a few years ago, that for all our big ideas and vainglory, we are puny and ineffectual, mere blaggers in the universe.

One of my favourite pictures from childhood, along with illustrations to E. Nesbit, and Tolkein, and Narnia, was from a 1930s children's history book that edified impressionable young minds in the days of Empire. Along with When did you last see your father, and Millais' two beautiful doomed boys, the Princes in the Tower (the elder, staring out from the darkness of captivity on the page with poetic prescience, his blond curls tumbling over his black velvet suit, was destined to be my husband, I knew in my eight-year old heart), my imagination was fired by a naked young girl's rescue from the window of an elegant Restoration mansion during the Great Plague of London.


Now the picture horrifies me more than the pestilence itself, a sickly Victorian excess of sentimental romanticization and sublimated paedophilia, the imagery of soft porn applied to social and medical history.

Before we pass sentence on our 19th century ancestors for lapping up this sort of mass-marketed fantasy, born out of the conviction that humans are the progressive conquerors of evil, and that the best way to secure ourselves against the return of a powerful enemy is by trivializing it, we should remember our own smugness, our own self-deluded race away from reality, our odd taste for sensationalism and tweeted voyeurism, our ambition to live longer and longer while poverty and inequality and cruelty and conceit infect the world. 

Who cares, so long as we can share a photo.

Thursday, 8 August 2013

Among Tigers and Panthers

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.”
SARAH SIDDONS by Lawrence
Portrait by Thomas Lawrence; Tate Gallery, London. Photo: Tate, London 2011 
The Tragic Muse of Neoclassicism and prophetess of Romanticism in a portrait of 1804, when she was nearing fifty, in which her lifelong friend, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769 -1830), displayed her powerful physique and brooding presence with such panache that she looks like a bruiser about to step forward and knock you out....  

Sunday, 4 August 2013

Romantic fictions and casualties

“I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…” 

 
The Art of Loving or The Pleasant Lesson, furnishing fabric,
Favre Petitpierre et Cie (possibly, maker), ca.1785-1790, detail © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
PART ONE
One autumn long ago, while Britain was at war with revolutionary France, and was rejoicing at the Royal Navy’s victory under Nelson at the Battle of the Nile, which thwarted Napoleon's ambitions to conquer the Middle East as he had done mainland Europe, and Irish rebels with French help were fighting their English oppressors, when Jenner had recently published his findings on small-pox vaccination, while a new poetry in Lyrical Ballads was being read for the first time, and a new kind of woman had appeared in a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft called Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse renounced forever the man she loved. 

He was a charming young artist who painted everyone as if he was in love with them. His pencil, chalk and brush had the power of Cupid's arrows to pierce men and women with the flushed, breathless heat of desire. When he looked at someone, however dull they had felt the moment before, they saw the reflection of beauty in his eyes.

He was....

Sunday, 21 July 2013

The Gathering in a Park

 Watteau: L'Assemblée dans un parc, oil on wood, 1716-17, Musée du Louvre. 
Image source: WGA

Last February, we went to the island of Ruegen on the weekend of a great storm. The Baltic raged for a day and a night, trees were torn out of the cliffs, and firefighters in the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern.were called out two hundred times. Next morning, the coast looked innocent, as if no violence had been committed, its pale sand beaches, white rock, and calm grey sea as pure as in Friedrich’s view of the chalk cliffs, jagged as canines, guarding the inverted triangle of water beyond.
detail of Caspar David Friedrich's Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen
One day, a few weeks after our trip, I caught up with myself, nine months in, a full term in which....

Monday, 1 July 2013

known unknowns

Part Seven of Among Tigers and Panthers
"MARIE-DENISE VILLERS"
by herself
OWNING HER IDENTITY: Young Woman Drawing, oil on canvas, 1801. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
For a long time after this painting was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum by a private collector in 1917, it was considered proficient enough to be the work of a male artist, even of the quintessence of neoclassicism, David, even though the gentle treatment and wistful mood, and the slight flat modelling of the face and slippered foot, are incompatible with the staged severity and anatomical precision of his recognized work. 

Art historians now usually attribute this painting to Marie-Denise Villers (1774-1821) and, gratifying our cut-and-dried need for names and labels, believe that it is a self-portrait. The sitter's identification, and whether she is sketching us or herself, does not detract from the imaginative suggestiveness of the picture, or of the picture within the picture, framed by the window pane, or of the unclouded certainty in her gaze. We are not really sure about anything, though we like to think power has been transferred from artist to spectator, and we are compelled to pontificate, blah and blog. But this half-forgotten painting defeats us. Knowledge belongs to the artist/model; she holds the source of reflected light illuminating her own face; through the image she has selected to show us, she is in control of her story....

Wednesday, 5 June 2013

My friend Sarah Vernon 1957 - 2021

While I was sitting in the dappled sunshine of the dying planet, reading my friend Sarah's blog, two women coming from different directions met in my mind's eye. They did not look or behave alike, but I saw them make a connection without a social networking site.

Madame de Staël was loud and unrestrained, emotionally and sexually; her stormy moods drove away her unfaithful lover, misnamed Constant; my friend Sarah is always self-controlled and elegant in everything she does.Though they both love hats, I've not yet seen Sarah in a bright silk turban like Madame de Staël's. 

Madame de Staël in her turban in a painting c.1810, attributed by different sources to
François Gérard or, more likely from the style and background,
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson.
Image source: Wikipedia

The thing that struck me just now, seeing them walking in the light, shining from the clarity of their intellects, their gift for friendship, their instinctive love of art and literature, their indefatigable courage and resourcefulness, is the knack they have of combining all this into a radiant whole, shedding light over the rest of us. 

They are instigators and inspirers and sharers. De Staël, a shrewd self-publicist who knew how to market her flamboyant personality, would have been blogging and tweeting if the technology had been at her disposal. If Sarah had lived in the early nineteenth century, and had Germaine's money and connections, she would have held a brilliant salon at her continental waterside retreat, presiding and encouraging others with wry wit and wisdom, discerning truth, laughing at folly, and founded and edited a cultural journal. She would have published novels and literary and theatre criticism; she would have decorated her home with original artworks, and she would have been a majestic actress, renowned for her beautiful voice, deep and rich, complex as fragrance notes. 

So here's to all the modern salonnières

Sarah, this was for you. 

 Germaine de Staël is very well known, and easy to find:
 
Madame de Staël's chateau at Coppet on Lake Geneva
 
If you want to know Sarah better, look here.
 
 

My friend Sarah Vernon 1957 - 2021

Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Among Tigers and Panthers....

Part Three
GERMAINE DE STAËL by Vigée Le Brun
Painter: Vigée Le Brun. Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

"Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris 
are friendship, fame, and love."
Germaine de Staël (1766-1817), writer of fiction, political propaganda, moral and feminist essays, literary criticicism and autobiography, held the most influential salon in France during the Directoire, was committed against the principles of Empire and became one of Napoleon's most eloquent opponents, moving her centre of power to her family home in Geneva after he exiled her from Paris.

Ambitious and passionate, a profuse lover and loyal friend, she was an intellectual of international significance, who analysed the prevailing cultural and political trends of her age in the eye of the storm, and identified the whole of humanity's frailty in her own emotional needs - "We cease to love ourselves if no one loves us". She felt and lived in the C-minor key of Romanticism in all its anguished yearning and exhilarating self-assertion, writing in  Réflexions sur le suicide: "Life often seems like a long shipwreck, of which the débris are friendship, fame, and love."

The classical motifs of this painting of her in the role of her own literary heroine Corinne, do not conceal either the subjective Romanticism of de Staël, daughter of Necker, the Swiss Protestant outsider appointed to reform the finances of the ancien régime, or the playful Rococo sophistication of Vigée Le Brun, who had achieved prominence through the patronage of Marie-Antoinette. Neither artist nor subject look fully at ease with the disciplines of neoclassicism from which de Staël's irreppressible energy bursts out in rebellion, making her the main force of nature in the landscape. She said she would rather suffer than be bored.

FASHION and EMANCIPATION 
Madame de Stl's Turban

Turbans of various kinds, simple or decorated with plumes and jewels, that had reappeared as informal headwear for fashionable women, for the first time since the Renaissance, in the pre-revolutionary 1780s, became a craze after Napoleon's Egyptian campaign (1798 -1801). 

The headdress acquired prestige among intellectuals through its association with Madame de Staël, who wore enormous, attention-grabbing turbans of brightly coloured silks:

 Germaine de Staël in one of her famous turbans, c.1810, in a detail of a painting attributed by different sources to François Gérard or, more likely from the style and background, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy Trioson.

Thursday, 9 May 2013

Indolent thoughts

Under the “killing sun”1 of Romanticism, an individual is reborn through love and empathy, their creative imagination kindled, and art, poetry and music thrive for the benefit of us all: “I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…”. And months, or minutes later, the same person feels they have been cheated into a fire: “I fly with HORROR from such a passion….”2
John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781) Image source: Wikipedia
In the spring of 1798, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse was reconciled to the man she truly loved, an artist who was the slave of the feeling of the moment, who....

Thursday, 18 April 2013

Among Tigers and Panthers...

Part Two
Anti-heroine or victim?
FRIDERIKA VON MECKLENBURG STRELITZ by Schadow

Terracotta bust, 1794, by Schadow. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Image source: Web Gallery of Art
  
The younger sister of Queen Louise had a tarnished career compared to the Prussian Madonna, in a much longer life circumscribed by unlucky marriages of convenience and necessity. Aged 15, she drew the short straw in the double marriage of the princesses of Mecklenburg Strelitz to two Prussian princes, the virtuous, strictly monogamous heir to the throne, Frederick William, and his more brilliant but dissolute younger brother, Louis Charles, who died three years later.

Amid the usual double standards about male and female adultery, there were salacious rumours that during her marriage, Friderika, instead of meekly suffering her unfaithful husband's neglect, retaliated by having an affair with one of his uncles, Louis Ferdinand, who was only a year older than him, and six years her senior.......

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

National mourning

RETURN WITH SHAME
 TO THE PLACE FROM WHICH [YOU] CAME
 
No, all taxpayers should not have been forced to pay their contribution to Thatcher's funeral, not morally nor financially. Those who think it is appropriate to pay respects should pay the rest of us respect, too. We are mourning, too, not her, but our "lost country, bought and sold", a collective soul murdered by the State, too blinded by greed to see the price of gold, in her name. Nothing could be more provocative or than the penalty of paying for this embarrassing ceremonial, confounding transient political personality with lasting national identity, when so many people are living on "the wine of desolation".
There is no point ranting further here, I'm just registering my own silent scream, hoping that all the screams and laments will rage like a torrent on the heads of colluders and collaborators, drowning out their funeral orations and that the only music heard will be the sound of Drake's drum calling sleeping Britain to arms, not against a foreign enemy, but the one within. Let all divisive politicians have unmarked graves. Let us shake our chains till tyrants quake with fear. Come, poets like Shelley, come Danny Boyle, give us the anti-Masque to this "ghastly masquerade".

(Every quote from Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy, 1819 - proving yet again that under different clothes and names, the nature of tyranny does not change.)

Saturday, 6 April 2013

Romantic despite herself

PART THREE
"I fly with HORROR from such a passion"
 
Sarah Martha Siddons, in a print made by Robert Graves in 1832 after Lawrence, mid 1790s. © The Trustees of the British Museum
Jane Austen was revising the first version of Sense and Sensibility (called Elinor and Marianne) in 1797-98, while the sisters Sally and Maria Siddons’ lives were being “embittered and disturbed”[4] by the portrait painter Thomas Lawrence, who could not decide which of Sarah Siddons' daughters he should love, and transferred his attentions from the elder to the younger and back again, all the while confiding in his close friend, their famous mother....

Monday, 1 April 2013

Romantic despite herself

PART TWO
"no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck..."
Charlotte Brontë's accusation that there is “no open country, no fresh air”1 in Austen’s polite world is untrue. Austen incorporates the natural world as her characters would see it, and their perceptions change over the years under the influence of Romanticism. Elizabeth admires Pemberley’s woods hanging over a winding stream with an 18th century appreciation of the picturesque; she is not emotionally uniting with nature; but a few years later, in about 1816, Anne Elliott, thinking of her own lost happiness, walks through the November fields quoting poetry about autumn to herself, glutting her sorrow on the mellow beauty around her, three years before Keats’ Ode to Autumn was published.
Painting, even the most familiar of places and weather, is another word for feeling: 
The Close, Salisbury oil by Constable,  
Victoria & Albert Museum. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

Constable, for whom painting was "but another word for feeling”2, was put on table mats...

Monday, 25 March 2013

Almost wild


The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, one of Gainsborough's intimate studies of his daughters made in the late 1750s, that take 18th century sensibility forward into a Romantic awareness of individual development through the senses.
He sees beyond the fragile innocence of two little girls, in the glancing light of a Rousseauian childhood idyll, to a more profound understanding, to the anxiety already showing in their faces as they move rapidly through the disturbing darkness of a wood, that is both catalyst and externalization of their unconscious minds. 

Happiness is always out of their reach; they experience, as Keats described, "the feel of not to feel it". I try to imagine again the first impression of this painting, first seen in childhood visits to the National Gallery, before knowing that both little girls suffered from a genetic mental disorder, and grew into deranged middle-aged women; wouldn't our hearts still ache for them, some knowledge intuitively divined, "without irritable reaching after fact and reason?"1
Image © copyright The National Gallery London
THE RELUCTANT ROMANTIC
She has no "warmth or enthusiasm"; she has nothing "energetic, poignant, or heartfelt"; "nothing profound." (Charlotte Brontë writing of Jane Austen)
"'She really looked almost wild'" (Mrs Hurst speaking of Miss Elizabeth Bennet)

Jane Austen has been cast outside and parallel to Romanticism, sometimes seen as its enemy, a purse-lipped spinster castigated thirty years after her death by Charlotte Brontë and many subsequent readers for putting sense and convention above passion and romance. 

Brontë was perplexed, almost enraged, by Austen's reputation as a great novelist. She had no "warmth or enthusiasm"; she has nothing "energetic, poignant, or heartfelt"; "nothing profound."

After forcing herself to read more of Austen's novels, at G.H.Lewes' suggestion, the highest qualities Brontë grudgingly allowed her predecessor,  were "clear common sense and subtle shrewdness." but "...the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings.."2

This is unfair to Austen and to pre-Victorian Romanticism, that engaged in constant debate with itself, neo-classicism and the Enlightenment....

Friday, 15 March 2013

Among Tigers and Panthers....

Neoclassical goddesses and Romantic Heroines: 
Part One
LOUISE OF PRUSSIA by Tischbein
Louise of Prussia, when Crown Princess, 1796, by Tischbein. Image source: damals.de
Louise, queen of Prussia (1776 - 1810), was one of the last and most accomplished of the Enlightenment's children among the European ruling class, educated under the principles of Rousseau, her imagination and taste fed on Schiller, Goethe and Shakespeare, a princess who could say after climbing the Schneekoppe mountain that she felt nearer to her god, and mean it.

During the Napoleonic Wars, in which Prussia, that had seemed invincible a generation earlier under Frederick the Great, was conquered by the French, Louise provided inspiration to the nation and to her husband, who relied upon her resolution and courage to the extent that Napoleon mockingly called her "the only real man in Prussia".

During her lifetime she was given more adulation than any other German queen consort; when she died aged thirty-four in 1810, frozen in time as a young mother, she was instantly mythologized, and became a symbol of German national unity and womanhood over a century before those ideals were perverted by the Nazis.

She was born on 10 March, 1776, into the minor ducal family of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in Northern Germany that was related to the Hanoverians by the marriage of her aunt Charlotte to King George III. The family's prestige continued to be raised by the next female generation on the  marriage market. 

The youthful beauty of Louise and her three sisters excited Romantic intellectuals like Goethe, who optimistically welcomed their appearance as a "heavenly vision" of aesthetic ideals, as much as prosaic German princes on the look-out for dynastic breeding mares.

The eldest sister, another Charlotte, later admired for her singing voice and literary patronage, was married off aged sixteen to the boorish Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and it was her younger sisters, Louise and Friederike, who were snatched up later for the greater marital prizes, both eventually becoming queen consorts. The unamiable characters of all their husbands amid the upheavals of European war pre-empted fairy-tale endings for any of the sisters. 

Only Louise, who became a mother of ten, was to achieve domestic happiness, with the determination of a mission.  She was pregnant for most of her seventeen-year marriage to Frederick William III of Prussia, and still found time to promote government reform, defy Napoleon and rally the nation during wartime defeat.


One of the most famous images of feminine beauty in German neoclassicism, JG Schadow's Prinzessinnengruppe of the sisters Louise and Friederika of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Sculpture, 1795, collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. At the time, both sisters were married to princes of Prussia. Louise's husband succeeded as king in 1796. The casual intimacy of the pose and the fashionably clinging dresses of real-life princesses shocked some contemporaries, used to more pompous formal presentations of royalty.
Early lessons in a cycle of matriarchal loss and replacement informed Louise's personal quest for emotional stability and her adult sense of maternal and social responsibility. Her mother died when she was six; after two years, her mother's younger sister stepped into the gap as step-mother to the young family, but she died in childbirth only a year later.  

Her grandmother, Marie Luise Albertine of Darmstadt, took over the care and education of the children of both the daughters who had predeceased her, bringing them up in a more affectionate and relaxed environment than was usual in contemporary aristocratic families.

Intelligent, strong-willed and energetic, sustained by moral purpose and a belief in her historical destiny, Louise welcomed the power her royal status gave her to perform charitable works and practise the liberal ideas of the 18th century philosophers and support military and social reformers within the absolutist Prussian government.

She was both typical of her time and ahead of it, a once and future heroine, whose natural warmth and spontaneity escaped caste boundaries, even at the repressive Berlin court. Instinctively pleasure-loving and light-hearted, she proved her fortitude and capacity for self-denial in exile for three years in Koenigsberg, in the far eastern reaches of Prussian territory, near the Russian border. 

During the French occupation, Louise expressed solidarity with the Prussian people through the simplicity of her dress and life-style, though she still tried to keep up with French fashions. She loved clothes extravagantly for their own sake, and also for their iconic value to her official position as queen and leader of neoclassical fashion in Germany.

Louise performed a balancing act as wife, mother and leader, scrupulously combining her career as chief political adviser to her husband with being his outwardly obedient consort, reining in reforms that she knew would exceed his tolerance, and matching her gentleness as a mother with the fierce resolve of a war leader.  

With foresight, she fought for the country's independence from the opposing threats of imperial French and Russian power, and died when the cause still looked hopeless, before the Allied victories of 1812 to1815.  Her husband and the nation sanctified her as a Prussian sacrifice to the Corsican Monster. 

From then on, her personality was distorted by popular culture and nationalist politics. Recently, historians, novelists and bloggers have attempted to disentangle the real Louise from all her various incarnations, domestic goddess, warrior queen and benevolent saint. who remains one of those historical figures on whom we continue to project our own aspirations and prejudices, shifting the focus as it suits us.
LOUISE OF PRUSSIA 

Friday, 8 March 2013

No end of words

By writing this for a poetry competition
about the end of days,
I’m colluding with spiritual genocide,
vicarious, of course,
all perpetrators’ hands clean of blood.
There’s nothing cheers the disaffected more
than bringing down a world that’s rejected them.

For twenty-five pounds I’d betray my species

with a spiteful sentiment classically columnized,
my disillusionment disguised as edified.....