Enchanted Islands

PART THREE of THEATRES OF POWER

 

As proof that Louis XIV’s power was absolute, Nature itself was subservient to him in the water gardens of Versailles. The fountain jets of le bosquet du théâtre d’eau (replaced in the early 1770s by a plain grass covered grove, and recently excavated) were designed, according to the fontaineer Claude Denis, to perform “obeisance to the king of kings”.

 Le théâtre d’eau - vue de la scène, 

one of the views of les bosquets, or groves, of Versailles by Jean Cotelle the younger, 1693. 

Image source: Wikipedia

For over a hundred years, the official pretexts for the exquisite staged illusions in the chateau's grounds were usually celebrations of royal weddings and new-born heirs, as you would expect of a fairy tale, but also, on occasion, the birth of a son to the king's favourite mistress of the moment, and the acquisition of territories through war, ruinously expensive in money and lives. "I have loved war too much", confessed the dying king, forty years later, when he bequeathed toxic, bankrupt splendour to his five year old heir. 

Feu d'artifice: Firework display on the canal at Versailles, one of the divertissements held at Versailles to celebrate the reconquest of Franche-Comté in 1674. On previous days of the festival, Lully's ballet Alceste had been performed in front of the Marble Court and Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire in front of the Grotto of Thetis. Engraving by Le Pautre, 1676. 

Image © RMN, Musée du Louvre/Photo Thierry de Mage

Advanced technology and artistic talent mythologized life at court, enabling the refulgent monarchy to divert the nobility into acquiescence during peacetime, and dazzle friends and enemies abroad, with ballets, plays, operas, tricks of the eye, dancing fountains, musical gardens and artificial fire. The population excluded from wealth and political power, the artisans and peasants, were invited to marvel at the pleasures of the elite from a safe distance, on the terrace behind the palace or in the branches of the garden trees.

Louis XIV had always intended Versailles should be a theatre...

The ministry of fashion

"Golden lads and girls....must come to dust."

Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart

Van Dyck, c. 1638. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Image source: WGA

Collateral damage of baroque absolutist illusion.

They were wrong but romantic; collateral damage of absolutism and revolution, teenage brothers, cousins of the king, transformed and immortalized by Van Dyck into an illusory image of English aristocracy that inspired fantasies still enjoyed today, including fictional upper-class heroes like the Scarlet Pimpernel and the 1930s gentleman detective, whose outward foppishness concealed brains and virility, and, more recently, re-invented as the modern meterosexual vampires of film and TV, whose lineage goes back beyond late Victorian Dracula, to Byronic heroes, Restoration libertines and doomed Cavalier youths.

The confident, sensual magnificence of Baroque male fashion boasted feminine attributes; in comparison, the presentation of ideal masculine sexuality of a hundred years earlier - Henry VIII in his straddling stance jutting out his codpiece - looks crudely insecure. 

Even a realistic artist and social observer like Frans

Theatres of Power

PART TWO

 It was not the artist's fault that the real king rode into the picture of himself and never came out.

 

Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Van Dyck, 1633, Royal Collection. 

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Baroque imagery, even when superbly executed by artistic geniuses, did not always succeed as political message in the patron's favour or keep the King or Queen's head on during a revolution, but it still works as art. Over three and a half centuries later, the first impression of Charles I that grabs most of us is Van Dyck's interpretation of a refined and chivalric paternalistic figure, not "that man of blood", the "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good of this nation" called to account for all the lives that had been lost in civil war.

 

Van Dyck's portraits, etherealising Charles I and his court, are as much of a theatrical device as Inigo Jones' fantastical masque designs, creating an ineradicable illusion of aristocratic grace and virtue in parallel with the historic reality of an unpopular and flawed regime. It was not the artist's fault that the real king walked into the picture and never came out. A sophisticated public relations initiative presented Stuart hereditary monarchy as an ideal nuclear family, affectionate and impeccably dressed, complete with pet dog and aspirational home.....

The tyranny of fantasy

THEATRES OF POWER 1580-1780
Part One

You climbed the stairs to see the interior of an opulent palace, where you half expected to find Sleeping Beauty, reminding you of the toy theatre you played with when you were a child, its painted flats arranged layer behind layer giving you the illusion of depth and space, over which you had dominion, one of your first tastes of the enchantment of power.

Giuseppi Valeriani: Set of designs for a stage set, 17th Century. 

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London 

This pretty and delicate model was designed in the early eighteenth century as a seven piece set by the Italian Russian artist Giuseppe Valeriani with pen and brown ink, watercolour and judicious use of gold leaf on paper.

It was the starting point of the exhibition Stages and Scenes: Creating Architectural Illusion at the Courtauld Gallery in 2008. The eight students on the Curating the Art Museum MA programme chose the piece before they had decided on a theme for their exhibition. Like a true fairy tale talisman, the object had powers of suggestion to open a door....

Broken hopes

Hafen Hamburg Eis by Martin Hübscher © 2010

reblogged with kind permission from Martin Hübscher Photography

Extract from a memoir by Sarah Vernon

Few people’s childhood impressions are recalled with as much honesty and poignant detail as Sarah's. She conjures the enormity of the smallest things, and the intensity of the desire to own every emotion, every moment.

With many thanks to Sarah, the first part of COMFORT IN A COTTON FROCK is reblogged from First Night Design

I wish Anne would come. Wednesday Anne. I want to help her today: I want to use the dustpan and brush. She’s broken her arm again so she can’t do any cleaning without me. I love her. How pretty you are, she says. I couldn’t do any of this without your help, she says. How I love her. She’s been around for ages and is even older than Mummy and Daddy. She used to clean for Ellen Terry and Ellen Terry was very famous and from very, very long ago. Charles-Who-Had-His-Head-Chopped-Off was around then. I think. I want to be Ellen Terry.....

Liberation and Self ownership

 THE LAUREL TROPHY

part six

 Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth 

sculpted in marble by Canova, 1796-1817, Canova Museum, Possagno

Instead of carrying off the charming but vacillating Madame Récamier to his Berlin palace as his bride in 1808, Prince Augustus of Prussia took the famous portrait by Gérard, perhaps sensing that owning an archetype of the eternal feminine was a more prestigious investment than a legal bond with the living woman.

The real Madame Récamier was unfazed by the incorruptible beauty of her painted alter ego, while her own fortunes, looks and health faded, and continued to pursue her career as a salonnière. It is a relief to know that her vitality, charming conversation and good taste were resilient to time and poverty. The cultural power generated by her reputation, that we would call her brand, was unassailable.

But something changed in her. At the age of forty she freed a hidden self when....

Pictures within pictures - which one is true and who owns the truth?

THE LAUREL TROPHY, part five

Detail of La Chambre de Madame Récamier à l'Abbaye-aux-Bois 

by François-Louis Dejuinne, 1827, showing Gérard's painting of Madame de Staël in the character of her literary heroine, Corinne, at top right.

After Madame de Staël's death in 1817, Prince August of Prusia commissioned a painting of her in the character of her most famous heroine, Corinne, as a gift for Madame Récamier. Among de Staël's most treasured possessions at Coppet had been a portrait and bust of Juliette.

These were not mere sentimental souvenirs of idealized female friendship. Public relations, mutual admiration and ideological statement all contributed to the self-created cult of two very different women who recognized their complementary attributes. One was a brainy, brilliant, pushy, sexually liberated published author, the Sappho of her times, and the other....

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.....

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.....

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...

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?.........

Chameleon and Narcissus

part four of The Character of Light

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....

"The next Keats can only be a painter”

part three of The Character of Light

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.....

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........

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.....

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....

off the rails

Rails at Pimlico, copyright Martin Hübscher 2007

MHPhotography

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.

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....