martin – Page 2 – Martin Gayford Art Critic

Poetic or pretentious? ‘Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust’ at the Royal Academy

‘Untitled (Tilly Losch)’, c.1935–38, by Joseph Cornell

Someone once asked Joseph Cornell who was his favourite abstract artist of his time. It was a perfectly reasonable question to put to a man who numbered Piet Mondrian, as well as other masters of modernism, among his acquaintance. But, characteristically, Cornell veered off at a tangent. ‘What’, he replied, ‘do you mean “my time”?’ In its way it’s a good response, as the exhibition at the Royal Academy, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust, makes clear.

The subtitle of the show refers to travel in mental space. In mundane reality, Cornell (1903– 72) seldom left New York City, and never ventured further afield than Maine. But in his imagination, he journeyed across the world and dwelt, mentally, in an era earlier than his own. Continue reading “Poetic or pretentious? ‘Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust’ at the Royal Academy”

Forget Vienna – Britain now has its own chamber of curiosities at the British Museum

Detail of a maiolica vase, c.1565–1571, a star piece for both Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill and later for Baron Ferdinand at Waddesdon Manor

Art is not jewellery. Its value does not reside in the price of the materials from which it is made. After all, the cost of the pigment, oil and cloth that made up a Rembrandt was negligible. It’s what he did with them that counts. On the other hand, spectacular works of art can be made from gold and gems, as is clear from some — if not all — of the items displayed in the new installation of the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum. ‘As soon as the swallows made their appearance,’ Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild wrote in his memoir Bric-à-Brac, ‘my father’s curiosities were packed and stored away in a strong room.’ It was the young Ferdinand’s privilege to help pack these objects. ‘Merely to touch them,’ he recalled, ‘sent a thrill of delight through my small frame.’ Continue reading “Forget Vienna – Britain now has its own chamber of curiosities at the British Museum”

The artist who only turned into a major painter once he became a homicidal maniac

Portrait photograph of Richard Dadd painting Contradiction (c.1857) in Bedlem

Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its ‘long vistas of stately oaks and elms’, he wrote, ‘occasionally a startled hare’ ran with ‘the speed of the shadows thrown by the light clouds’. It was there on the morning of 29 August 1843 that a butcher from Rochester got a nasty surprise. He discovered the corpse of an apothecary named Robert Dadd; he had been battered and stabbed to death by his son Richard.

There is no doubt that Richard Dadd was far from sane. On the other hand, his loss of mental balance — though very bad in its consequences for his father — was the making of Dadd as an artist. Only after he became a homicidal maniac did he turn into a major painter.

A 26-year-old star of the early Victorian art world when he committed this terrible crime, Dadd spent the remaining 43 years of his life in psychiatric institutions, first Bethlem (or Bedlam) Hospital in London and then the newly founded Broadmoor. While living in Bedlam, Dadd, very slowly, produced his two masterpieces — ‘Contradiction: Oberon and Titania’ (1854–8) and ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ (c. 1855–64) — both of which are on show in an exhibition at the Watts Gallery at Compton near Guildford: The Art of Bedlam. This is small in size but, because of the nature of his art, it amounts to something approaching a retrospective. Its curator, Nicholas Tromans, is also the author of a book, Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum, which reveals much new information about those long years of incarceration as a ‘criminal lunatic’.

The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke — ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ by Richard Dadd

In his greatest pictures Dadd seems to shrink space. The closer you look, the more you see. For example, in the centre of ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ there is seated a white-bearded Gandalf-like sage identified by Dadd as an ‘arch-magician’. After peering closely for a while, you notice a tiny cavalcade — according to Dadd, Queen Mab and her retinue of ‘female centaurs’ — riding across the brim of his hat.

The whole painting — less than two feet high — is like that. The small figures you notice first of all tower over yet more minute ones, and all of them surrounded by gigantic daisies and grasses: the setting a few square inches of woodland floor. The earlier ‘Contradiction’ is similar in its teeming population, overscale vegetation and airless atmosphere — as if it were taking place indoors under a glass canopy.

‘Bacchanalian Scene’ (1862) has the same close-focus botanical observation and claustrophobic lack of space, but instead of tiny figures it consists of three big faces, jammed together. The eyes of a bearded man to the left swivel towards a young woman in the centre, while the pulpy lips of a satyr protrude greedily in the direction of a goblet he is holding.

Dadd’s descent into insanity during a prolonged journey to the eastern Mediterranean in 1842–43 reads like a story by Edgar Allan Poe. On Corfu he found himself surrounded by a ‘large assortment of pompous ruffians’ with such ‘deliciously villainous faces’ as to ‘turn the brain of a poor artist’ (a description that reminds one of ‘Bacchanalian Scene’). By the time he got to Petra, ‘the excitement of these scenes’ was such that when he lay down at night he ‘really and truly doubted his own sanity’.

On the return journey, in Rome, Dadd felt impelled to assassinate Pope Gregory XVI but found the pontiff (who was paranoid himself) too well-guarded, then spotted the devil disguised as ‘an old English lady in a lavender-silk dress’, looking at pictures in the Vatican galleries. She had a lucky escape.

On the one hand Dadd was violent and demented, yet in other moods, according to his case notes, he could be ‘a very sensible and agreeable companion’ and clearly was creative on a high level. This was the contradiction that intrigued his contemporaries; like our ancestors of the romantic era, we still remain fascinated by the blurred boundary between imagination and derangement.

tumblr_n6ta11Tpex1rmfjg7o1_1280 — ‘Girl in Bed’ by Lucian Freud

At the Ordovas gallery, 25 Savile Row, there is an even smaller exhibition testifying to a very different kind of obsession: Lucian Freud’s love for his second wife, Caroline Blackwood (1931–96). They met in 1949 at a ball given by Lady Rothermere, a memorable occasion on which Francis Bacon booed Princess Margaret off stage when she attempted to sing a Cole Porter song.

The brief time he spent with her was one to which Freud returned frequently in conversation. He was enchanted by her nervousness, which led her to chain-smoke so that her nostrils were blackened ‘like railway tunnels’, and her impracticality, which led her to hold matches the wrong way up, so they almost always went out.

The exhibition contains only four pictures, and is well worth visiting to see just one: ‘Girl in Bed’ (1952), one of Freud’s early masterpieces. He records each tiny detail: her anxious, wayward look, the corrugations on her lips, and above all her huge grey-blue eyes. An unfinished fragment of a painting depicts just one of those eyes in which everything — the room in which he is painting, the whole world — seems to be reflected.

Originally published in The Spectator

Whole worlds conjured up in a few strokes: ‘Watercolour’ at the Fitzwilliam Museum reviewed

Turner’s ‘Shakespeare Cliff, Dover’ (c.1825)

I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad of thickly ‘toothed’ paper and a Winsor & Newton paintbox on a wind-swept East Anglian seashore. Now, looking back, I see that what she was doing belonged to a tradition. Her predecessors, idols and reference points are to be seen in an admirable small exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Watercolour — Elements of nature.

This consists of works from the museum’s collection, but is much more full of delightful surprises — even for those who know the Fitzwilliam well — than that description suggests. The reason is that, while most British galleries own plenty of watercolours, you don’t often see them because they are fragile. Exposed to light, the paper turns yellow and the colours fade.

This is presumably why, although Samuel Palmer’s ‘The Magic Apple Tree’, c. 1830, is one of the Fitzwilliam’s most compelling possessions — a masterpiece of visionary rustic romanticism — it is not always to be seen on display. It is now, though, as are numerous pictures that I don’t recall ever spotting in decades of visiting the Fitz.

The Magic Apple Tree, by Samuel Palmer — Samuel Palmer’s ‘The Magic Apple Tree’ (1830)

These are not exclusively British — the selection includes French flower painting, impressionist and post-impressionist works — but a lot of them are. Watercolour became a national speciality in the late Georgian and Victorian eras. One reason sometimes advanced for this is that watercolour is perfectly adapted to the depiction of a climate that largely consists of differing degrees of wetness.

Turner’s ‘Shakespeare Cliff, Dover’ (c. 1825) is a perfect case in point. It represents almost nothing solid. The chalk outcrop of the title is a ghostly presence consisting of a patch of white paper given form by a few faint veils of blue-grey wash. The rest of the picture is made up of varying intensity of the same: dark, almost black in places on the surface of a stormy sea and the clouds above. In the centre, the real centre of the picture, is a whirling vortex of lashing rain.

Of course, there is no single correct way to paint with watercolour. On show are diverse ways of using pigment diluted with water. Portrait miniatures — such as Nicholas Hilliard’s ‘Henry Percy’ (c. 1595), an Elizabethan intellectual reclining in a flowery meadow, open book behind him — are precisely detailed rather than loosely washy. So too are Ruskin’s studies of rocks and leaves, as sharply focussed as a daguerreotype.

If desired, substances such as flour and gum could be added to make the colours thicker: Palmer and Cotman both did this. On the other hand, the watery medium does not suit those who prefer to build up layer after layer of pigment, revising and changing. Constable was a natural painter in oils; his watercolours, such as ‘Windermere’ (1806), while perfectly accomplished, don’t seem truly him. Turner, conversely, seems most himself in watercolour.

Several paintings on show are almost Chinese in the way they conjure up a whole world with a few quick strokes of the brush. A sketch of a tree and hull of a boat at mooring by Peter De Wint (1784-1849) creates a riverbank and its reflection in the water below from one almost continuous but subtly inflected greenish blob: virtuoso fluidity.

Grey and Silver - North Sea, by Whistler — Whistler’s ‘Grey and Silver – North Sea’

Whistler’s ‘Grey and Silver — North Sea’ (c. 1884) is close to not being there at all, so faint are the pale washes that make up a maritime panorama, with just a sailing boat in the centre to anchor it in reality. Looking at it, I realised that this was the kind of effect my grandmother, trained at art school in the first part of the 20th century, must have been aiming at all those years ago.

Transparency is also the key to the art of Larry Bell, an American whose work is on show at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London SW1. Bell (b. 1939) is one of a number of Californian artists whose work is actually formed from those staple ingredients of so many pictures, light and space.

James Turrell, the best-known of these, uses light alone. Bell’s output is typically a little more substantial, but not much. His most characteristic pieces are made from glass, specially coated both to reflect and absorb light so that their surfaces appear simultaneously there and not there.

Screen Shot 2015-07-30 at 13.44.20 — Larry Bell’s ‘SF 6.23.12’ (2012)

On show at White Cube there are iridescent curvilinear shapes suspended in boxes, a maze of semi-transparent partitions, and a shelf placed in the corner of the room illuminated in such a way as to throw a double cone of light onto the wall, with multiple spectrums of colour like a butterfly’s wing above it. In other words, Bell has made a sort of sculpture from a rainbow. Turner might have been interested.

Originally published in The Spectator

‘Unfinished’ at the Courtauld Gallery

‘Turning Road (Route Tournante)’, c.1905, by Paul Cézanne

A while ago, David Hockney mused on a proposal to tax the works of art stored in artists’ studios. ‘You’d only have to say they weren’t finished, and you are the only one who could say if they were,’ he suggested. ‘There’d be nothing they could do.’ This is the state of affairs examined in Unfinished, a thought-provoking little exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery.

Once upon a time, it was as clear whether a painter had completed a picture as it was whether the gardener had thoroughly mowed the lawn. Indisputably, Perino del Vaga downed tools for some reason halfway through his ‘Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist’ (1528–37). That’s obvious. Some parts are depicted in fine detail, others remain merely drawn outlines on the panel. Yet someone kept it because, even as it is, it’s beautiful.

This is where the topic begins to get complicated. There was a rather crass definition of ‘finished’ that was upheld, for example, at the 19th-century Royal Academy. It meant, roughly, ‘neatly and smoothly brushed all over’ (or polished, in the case of a sculpture). Thus the young Constable was told his landscape required more ‘finish’. But there are many other ways to bring a work to a conclusion.

It seems Rembrandt was the first to proclaim the Hockney doctrine: that a picture was finished if and only if he, its creator, said so. But this generates paradoxes. Why did Rembrandt leave his etching ‘The Artist Drawing from the Model’ (c.1639) as evidently ‘unfinished’ as the Perino del Vaga, with large areas of the plate just barely sketched in outline but about a third carefully elaborated? Perhaps he wasn’t happy with the composition — but in that case, why did he go ahead and print it? Surely it couldn’t be that he actually liked the image as it was? But its blend of ‘finished’ and ‘unfinished’ was fascinating enough to have influenced Picasso’s meditations on the theme of artist and model in ‘The Vollard Suite’.

Move on to the late 19th century and the question gets even more complex. In the case of a late Cézanne such as ‘Turning Road (Route Tournante)’ c.1905 there is, just as in the Perino, plenty of bare, unpainted surface. Did Cézanne intend to add more, and die before he was able to do it? Was he happy with it as it is? Had he even decided? It is impossible to say, but it looks fabulous as it is.

By that time, conventional taste had concluded that Michelangelo’s unfinished works were much better that way. The master himself would probably not have agreed, but he did regard the life of an artist as an unending struggle for perfection.

Michelangelo would also have seen the point of the current exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum: Drawn from the Antique. This investigates how the remains of ancient Greek and Roman art were a basis of art education from the Renaissance until the day before yesterday — and a source of inspiration that for artists continued throughout their careers.

According to a 16th-century anecdote, Cardinal Farnese met the septuagenarian Michelangelo one winter day near the Coliseum. He asked him where he was walking to through the snow. ‘I am still going to school to learn,’ the great man replied, meaning that his destination was the ruined amphitheatre.

Only in the 1960s and ’70s did most art schools throw out their casts of classical sculpture. Until then, as Drawn from the Antiqueillustrates with evocative images, students had for centuries learnt to comprehend the human body by copying these hallowed objects (traditionally, before they were let loose on living models). In a tenderly affectionate pen-and-wash drawing of around 1595, Federico Zuccaro depicted his deceased elder brother Taddeo assiduously studying ancient sculptures as a young artist in Rome, half a century before.

‘A Painter’s Studio’ (c.1646–50) by Michael Sweerts, a Flemish painter living in Rome, shows artists working from three sources: a naked life model, a plaster cast of a flayed cadaver and casts of ancient carving. These last are a wonderful jumbled pile of heads, limbs and torsos — much like the Soane Museum itself, which is a sort of architectural and sculptural collage, unified, like Sweerts’s painting, by the drama of lighting.

There was, however, a danger in excessive copying just as there was in the insistence on a smooth ‘finish’. It could be deadening and, in a great deal of 18th- and 19th-century art, certainly was. Michelangelo pointed out the pitfall soon after having seen the newly rediscovered Laocoön in 1506. This was, he apparently exclaimed, ‘a singular miracle of art’ but, he went on, ‘we should grasp the divine genius of the sculptor’ rather than simply imitate the work. In other words, art cannot be reduced to a simple and easily taught formula.

Originally published in The Spectator

Between the death of Turner and advent of Bacon, there was no greater British painter

Walter Sickert ‘The Theatre of the Young Artists’ (1890)

Walter Sickert was fluid in both his art and his personality: changeable in style and technique, mutable in appearance — now dressing as a French fisherman, now as a dandy, next shaving his head — and even in name (for a while he styled himself Richard, not Walter, Sickert). All of which makes his long artistic association with the seaside resort of Dieppe apt in more ways than one. This is the theme of an excellent exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. A century ago Dieppe was a very Sickertian place.

In ancestry and artistic attitudes, Sickert was an exemplary cosmopolitan. His father was Danish-German; his mother the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy astronomer from Leeds and an Irish dancer (it was from the last, one suspects, that he inherited his handsome looks, and perhaps the impish strain in his character).

RAG94011 — Walter Sickert ‘The Fair at Night’ (c.1902)

Thanks to the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the steamboat from Newhaven, the French port was one of the closest bits of abroad to the West End. In the late 19th century, the journey took 11 hours. On one occasion, Sickert’s friends Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Conder and the writer Ernest Dowson set off impromptu on the boat train after an evening’s drinking. When they arrived the next day, these luggage-less decadents would have found a Norman town with ancient churches and picturesque streets, but also grand hotels, nightspots and a casino.

Dieppe was crumbly and up-to-date, seedy and smart all at the same time — a touch of Brighton and a smidgeon of Monte Carlo, with a Norman accent. Over nearly 40 years, from the mid-1880s to the early 1920s, Sickert (1860–1942) painted all these different aspects of the place. The results, as the exhibition demonstrates, were varied in approach, but also uneven in quality.

Walter Sickert, L’Hotel Royal, Dieppe, 1894, Museum Sheffield — Walter Sickert ‘L’Hotel Royal, Dieppe’ (1894)

Sickert at his best was a connoisseur of urban moods that were a bit like the still life he painted of a piece of Roquefort cheese: piquant and pungent. His ‘L’Hôtel Royal’ (1894) — the sky behind a light mauve, the structure itself greenish in the twilight — perfectly catches that desolate, slightly weird quality that seaside places often have.

In that vein, ‘Le Grand Duquesne, Dieppe’ (1902) is an out-and-out masterpiece. It depicts the statue of a local naval hero, Admiral Duquesne, silhouetted in deep shadow against brilliantly sunlit buildings. Around the railings at the base of the monument a few figures are standing aimlessly.

You could not confuse ‘Le Grand Duquesne’ with a work by anyone else (though the enigmatic melancholy is reminiscent of Edward Hopper and also De Chirico). Yet several of the pictures in the same room are nondescript; so, too, are almost all the landscapes done in the country near to Dieppe. ‘Le Vieux Colombier’ (1913) manages to be lurid and dull at the same time.

It is not uncommon for major artists to veer between mediocre and marvellous in this way (Gauguin is another example). In Sickert’s case, the inconsistency was perhaps to do with the complexity of his origins. He was, he once insisted, ‘a French painter’, by which he meant that his two teachers were first Whistler — an expatriate American whose sensibility was formed in France — and later Degas. Sickert produced pictures heavily influenced by both (and featured himself in Degas’s group portrait of ‘Six Friends at Dieppe’ from 1885).

MAN1772681 — Walter Sickert ‘Statue of Duquesne, Dieppe’ (1902)

Sickert painted the Church of St Jacques in Dieppe over and over again, which might seem reminiscent of Monet’s depictions of Rouen Cathedral. But Monet analysed the fluctuations of light and air on the façade; Sickert seemed more interested in the dark and brooding aspect of the Gothic structure.There were, however, other ingredients in Sickert’s make-up. He had a pronounced affection for Victorian painting of the ‘every picture tells a story’ variety (and hence an unexpected taste for the works of Frith). This led him to produce eccentric images such as ‘The Blind Sea Captain’ (1914), a tear-jerker in the Pre-Raphaelite mould executed in a technique close to Monet or Pissarro. Also he had a tendency — perhaps derived from his Nordic painter father — towards crepuscular atmospherics.

When all the strains in Sickert’s complex temperament blended together — which was by no means always — the results were compelling. Then, despite his claim — possibly cantankerous — to be a French artist, he can seem the most notable British painter in the century between the death of Turner and the advent of Francis Bacon.

Originally published in The Spectator

The only art is Essex – from Eric Ravilious to Grayson Perry

Ravilious in Essex: ‘Two Women in the Garden’, watercolour, 1932

When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may not have been true then — this was in the 1980s — or even now. What is indisputable, however, is that there have been plenty of artists in the county. They are the subject of two small but delightfully jam-packed exhibitions at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden.

Bawden (1903–1989) is at the heart of both of them, even if the second point he made to me — equally emphatically — was that he called himself a designer rather than an artist (‘out of self-defence, mainly’). That distinction, and the quirky humour, are both relevant to the question of Essex art, especially the variety that is the focus of attention at the Fry.

From the early 1930s to the 1960s there was an informal artist’s colony in the north of the county, centred on the village of Great Bardfield. It included, among others, Bawden, his friend Eric Ravilious who lived for a while nearby at Castle Hedingham, plus the painters John Aldridge, Michael Rothenstein, Sheila Robinson and Walter Hoyle.

This was as strongly flavoured in its way as the settlement of abstract artists on the other side of England, in St Ives beside the sea. But the emphasis was quite different. The Cornish modernists were affected by currents from abroad; Mondrian almost joined them, until he reflected that there was too much nature around in Cornwall and headed for New York instead. The Essex crowd, in contrast, were sturdily indigenous in their influences and revelled in the rural scene.

Several of them devoted as much energy and attention to design — including interior design — as they did to painting pictures. Accordingly, one of the mini-exhibitions at the Fry is devoted to the houses of the Great Bardfield artists. These were decorated in an idiosyncratic manner, blending pieces of British folk art such as Staffordshire figures with items of their own design. Among the latter, the wallpapers by Bawden and Ravilious’s ceramics were outstanding.

The overall effect is exuberant, cluttered and eclectically cosy. On show there is a dresser crammed with bits and pieces of old pottery, interspersed with Ravilious’s plates, teapots, bowls and mugs, produced by Wedgwood. Plenty of wallpaper is on display, by Bawden and also John Aldridge, all with an energy that must have made these rustic Georgian dwellings seem to fizz and crackle.

‘A good pattern is as good as a painting,’ Bawden told me. ‘I’d sooner have a good bit of William Morris than I would a lot of modern rubbish.’ With him, you felt, this wasn’t entirely a joke: the design really was at the heart of what he did. And he was right: a square section from his wallpapers — Wood Pigeon (c. 1925), for example — framed, makes a compelling picture. Moreover, the best of his other work — the marvellous linocuts in particular — has a strong element of linear patterning.

The houses, and gardens, quite often became subjects of art. One of the star items in the Fry Gallery’s collection is Ravilious’s watercolour of ‘The Attic Bedroom, Brick House’ (c. 1932–34). This depicts the guest accommodation chez Bawden, where a most uncomfortable-looking camp bed shared the space with a mass of pot plants and bric-a-brac: all melded into a neatly dynamic composition.

Another display at the Fry groups numerous artists from the Bardfield area, starting from the point when Bawden discovered the place in 1932, while cycling around the countryside. Then, living there must have seemed like stepping into the 19th century. It was also cheap: ten shillings a week for a double-fronted Georgian house (later his father bought it for him as a wedding present).

On show there are some more transient visitors to the areas, such as Kenneth Rowntree and Keith Vaughan. It ends with a plate by Grayson Perry, who lived in Bardfield as a teenager. On reflection — and unexpectedly — there are affinities between Perry and Bawden in a shared liking for making useful and decorative things and a pungent sense of humour.

Art in Essex turns out to be an unexpectedly rich theme. Indeed, there is more — John Wonnacott’s Thames estuary landscapes, for example, or Cedric Morris’s art school at Dedham, attended by the teenaged Lucian Freud — to be explored. Currently the Fry Art Gallery is raising money to buy the freehold of the building it occupies, which strikes me as an excellent cause.

Originally published in The Spectator

How silverpoint revolutionised art

Left: ‘The Virgin and the Child’, c.1509, by Raphael Right: ‘Portrait of an unknown young woman’, c.1435, by Rogier van der Weyden

Marshall McLuhan got it at least half right. The medium may not always be the entire message, but it certainly dictates the kind of message that can be transmitted. This is one lesson of Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns, an exhibition at the British Museum that is packed with subtle masterpieces, and as a bonus contains — for those who like such things — two of art’s great studies of dogs.

I might as well start with those: one by Albrecht Dürer from around 1520, ‘Dog resting’, and the other by the later Dutch artist Hendrick Goltzius of his own pet, curled up and sleeping in about 1597. Both of these display the virtues of silverpoint. It is a medium that is marvellously well adapted to depicting the surfaces of things — such as the hairs of a canine coat, or the shine of a doggy nose.

It was also a good sketching medium, you could take your little book of prepared paper with you, the metal stylus tucked into the cover. When you saw something worth drawing — such as your own Partridge Dog snoozing rather charmingly or, as Goltzius did on another occasion, one of the relatively newly introduced tobacco plants growing — you could whip out your sketchbook and jot it down with no need to worry about dipping your quill in a pot of ink or sharpening your sticks of chalk.

Thus, and in other ways, silverpoint probably contributed to a revolution in art: the sudden, extraordinary development of visual naturalism in the 15th century. It was a convenient and beautiful way of recording the finest nuances in the way things looked. You can see that done to perfection in a drawing such as the ‘Portrait of a Papal Legate’ (c.1461) by the French artist Jean Fouquet. Every undulation of his swelling jowls and bristle of his eyebrows is delicately caught, as is the tough look in his eye (not an easy man, one would guess, to negotiate with).

Silverpoint is a somewhat approximate term, comparable to bronze in sculpture (which pedants would prefer to term ‘copper alloy’). Other types of metal, including gold and lead, will also leave a mark on a slightly roughened surface such as paper with some bone ash in it. So ‘metalpoint’ is more accurate, although silver seems to have been the favourite.

Once the mark is made, it is hard to remove. But for the same reason it lasts extremely well: the Fouquet drawing still looks pretty much as it must have done when he made it. So, too, does an even earlier work: ‘Portrait of a Man with a Falcon’ by Petrus Christus (c.1445–50), a work that gives the closest attention to such matters as the soft furriness of the brim of the sitter’s hat as opposed to the coarser wooliness of its crown.

Silverpoint was perfect for denoting such things. The luxuriantly silky waves of hair in ‘Head of the Virgin’ from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden (c.1450–70) could be used to advertise shampoo. It is not hard to guess that this kind of silverpoint sketch probably began with Jan van Eyck, the originator of Northern Renaissance naturalism. How else could he have recorded the convincingly real landscapes, plants and objects with which his paintings abound?

Silverpoint was, as the exhibition makes clear, a favourite medium of northern artists in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Italians also took it up, but in Italy — as Hugo Chapman explains in a catalogue essay — silverpoint drawing comes to a full stop with the death of Raphael in 1520. The reason was, probably, that the great and hugely influential Michelangelo never seems to have used it. It was not so good for conveying the three-dimensional power of form in which he was interested.

In time, silverpoint went out of style everywhere. In the north a few artists such as Rembrandt — connoisseurs not just of line but also of different types of line — continued to use it a little into the 17th century. Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was revived by artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites, who were attracted to the precision and naturalism of the era of Van Eyck and Dürer. The exhibition ends with a piece by Bruce Nauman, an unexpected exponent of silverpoint. His 2013 study of his own hands is strangely reminiscent of an amazing sheet by Leonardo from 1489–90 in which he drew a woman’s head and shoulders, again and again, so they blend into an almost abstract phantasmagoria: a supreme virtuoso of line trying to capture the ceaseless flux of reality.

Originally published in The Spectator

Eugene Delacroix at the National Gallery

‘The Death of Sardanapalus’, 1846, by Eugène Delacroix

At the Louvre the other day there was a small crowd permanently gathered in front of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’. They constantly took photographs of the picture itself, and sometimes of themselves standing in front of it. No such attention was given to the other masterpieces of French painting hanging nearby, including many by Delacroix. This painting from 1830 — with its glamorous, bare-breasted personification of liberté, Tricolore in hand, followed by heroic representatives of the working and middle classes — has become an international shorthand for France itself.

Whether or not this is a valid symbol of the country, it is a misleading guide to Delacroix’s own feelings about his native land, its revolutionary traditions and the modern world he watched developing around him in 19th-century Paris. He may have supported liberté, but fraternité and égalité not so much. A truer indication of his opinions is probably to be found in the mural that he painted in a half dome of the library of the Chamber of Deputies at the Palais Bourbon: ‘Attila and his Hordes Overrun Italy and the Arts’.

An exhibition next month at the National Gallery will present Delacroix as the apostle of modernism — and rightly so. He was revered as a predecessor by the impressionists and post-impressionists. A couple of hours before I was strolling through the Louvre last week, I was able to climb the scaffolding in the church of Saint-Sulpice where his wall paintings are currently under restoration. From a foot or two away, Delacroix’s vivid, vibrating colours and bold brush strokes looked startlingly reminiscent of those of Van Gogh or Gauguin.

There is, however, a paradox about the notion of Delacroix as the forerunner to the avant-garde of the 1880s and ’90s. He was a romantic pessimist, inclined to think that civilisation would always decline and barbarism inevitably return. It would be an exaggeration, Kenneth Clark thought, to say that Delacroix sympathised with Attila, but — Clark went on — he gave the leader of the Huns, trampling on the remains of ancient Roman culture, ‘the same irresistible energy’ as the lions and tigers he loved to paint.

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was, like many highly creative people, a bundle of contradictions. He was an ardent lover of big cats, an artist whose images of tigers, Clark thought, were truer self-portraits than the pictures he made of his actual features. Meanwhile in everyday life Delacroix was an anglophile dandy — one of the first Parisians to wear suits cut in the English style — who aimed at a frigid self-control. ‘The mask is everything,’ he noted in 1823.

The contrast between Delacroix’s carefully preserved exterior and the swirling emotions within was summed up in a celebrated metaphor by his friend and admirer Charles Baudelaire. The painter resembled, Baudelaire wrote, ‘A volcanic crater artistically concealed beneath bouquets of flowers.’ He wanted to hide, as the poet put it, the ‘rage in his heart’ behind a glacial façade, but also — as the scholar Lee Johnson added — ‘his vulnerability and shyness’.

Delacroix suffered throughout his life from poor health, possibly caused by a tubercular infection that affected his throat and lungs. Furthermore, he was also plagued by a weak digestion, perhaps resulting from highly strung nerves. At work, carefully wrapped up against the cold in an old jacket buttoned to the chin, slippers and a muffler around the neck, he resembled neither a tiger nor a dandy.

He was a child of the French Revolution, but probably an illegitimate one. His ostensible father, Charles-François Delacroix, was minister of foreign affairs in the republican government. However, Charles-François Delacroix was impotent for many years as a result of an enormous growth on one of his testicles. This was removed in an operation — without anaesthetic, of course — in mid-September 1797. Eugène was born seven and a half months later. A persistent rumour claims that his true father was the great statesman Talleyrand, Charles-François Delacroix’s successor at the foreign ministry.

In 1805, Charles-François Delacroix died leaving only unwise investments and large debts. The painter came of age in the France of the restored monarchy, which he deplored (hence his support for the revolutionaries of 1830, which ejected the reactionary Charles X). But, like the heroes of his friend the novelist Stendhal, Delacroix deplored not just the stuffiness and corruption of Paris in the 1820s, but also the modern world itself with its new wealth and mass public. ‘I have never loved the crowd,’ he wrote in 1820, ‘nor all that the crowd feeds on.’

As time went on, his dislike focused on the bourgeoisie, often a bugbear for intellectuals and artists, in France and elsewhere. An acquaintance recalled that ‘among all those men who had a profound, ineradicable contempt for the bourgeois’, only Flaubert disdained them more than Delacroix. Even his perfect manners scarcely concealed his loathing for the middle classes who represented, he believed, a ‘wholly new barbarism’. He was, in other words, a snob both socially and intellectually.

‘Commercialism and love of pleasure are,’ he gloomily noted in 1857, ‘to the present way of thinking, the most compelling motives of the human soul.’ When the idea of progress — the ‘great chimera of modern times’ — was mentioned, he would ask where the contemporary equivalents of Raphael or Phidias were.

As it happened, Delacroix knew more geniuses than most people do, in any age. Chopin, Stendhal, Baudelaire and George Sand were among his circle (Balzac he knew but didn’t much like). He was an example of another paradox: the insider who feels like an outsider. One of the plagues of the modern age, Delacroix felt, was journalists — and in particular art critics, who were, it is true, unreasonably rude about his work. Delacroix was resolutely opposed by the artistic establishment of his day. It took him no fewer than seven attempts before he was elected, very late in life, to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Yet he was loaded with well-paid commissions through the assistance of friends such as the politician and writer Adolphe Thiers.

So it is that some of Delacroix’s most majestic achievements are now hidden away in government premises. He painted a huge cycle on the theme of the rise and fall of civilisation in the library of the Palais Bourbon (seat of the French National Assembly). At one end Orpheus teaches the arts of civilisation to the — slightly dubious — ancient Greeks; at the other, Attila destroys them. This, and his depiction of a scene from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ in the dome of the library at the Palais du Luxembourg — seat of the Sénat — are not easy to visit these days because of the new barbarism of international terrorism.

They are evidence of another paradox. Delacroix was in many ways the final representative of the line of grand public pictures descended from Raphael and Michelangelo. The late works in Saint-Sulpice are the last great religious murals in the European tradition, but they were painted by a despairing agnostic. Delacroix believed that after death mankind faced ‘night, dreadful night’ — or so he told George Sand. He thought Voltaire had been correct to declare that while alive humanity was faced with a stark choice between being ‘convulsed with anxiety or lethargic with boredom’. There, too, he perhaps anticipated the predicament of the modern age.

Originally published in The Spectator

Renaissance master? Rascal? Thief? In search of Giorgione

‘Portrait of a Young Man’ by Giorgione

On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was having a mixed time in Venice: on the one hand, as Dürer explained, he was making lots of delightful new acquaintances, among them ‘good lute-players’ and also ‘connoisseurs in painting, men of much noble sentiment and honest virtue’. However, there was also a very different type lurking in the early 16th-century Serenissima: ‘the most faithless, lying, thievish rascals such as I scarcely believed could exist on earth’.

Dürer hints that among these latter were painters, perhaps including some whose works will be seen in a forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, In the Age of Giorgione. Conceivably one who got on the wrong side of Dürer was the shadowy genius himself, Giorgione of Castelfranco.

Of the great masters of the early 16th century, Giorgione (c.1477/8–1510) is by some way the most elusive. Unfortunately, he did not write home to Castelfranco — a fine fortified town in the Veneto — or if he did no correspondence exists. Indeed, not much survives at all, either in the way of evidence or of art. He died young, probably in his early thirties and of the plague. Giorgio Vasari, author of the greatLives of the Artists, tells us that he ‘took unceasing delight in the joys of love’, which is plausible enough given the amorously poetic mood of some pictures by — or attributed to — him, and his development of a new sort of nude.

Apparently, it was Giorgione, whose name just means ‘big George’, who first combined the anatomy of a classical marble Venus with the delicately fleshly sensuality made possible by the oil medium (especially practised in the softer-focused fashion he may also have pioneered). Vasari also relates that the ‘sound of the lute gave him marvellous pleasure’, and Giorgione himself sang and played so well that he spent a lot of time performing — which may help to explain why there are so few of his paintings now.

However, Vasari was writing decades after Giorgione’s death and, as a patriotic Tuscan, he was distinctly hazy about Venetian art in general and Giorgione in particular. Though he did not mention Giorgione, Dürer was on the spot at the time. And his complaint about the younger painters of Venice was that they stole his ideas (he may, as we shall see, have had a point). Dürer specifically excluded the venerable Giovanni Bellini, then aged around 76, from his vilification. Bellini, he wrote, though old, ‘is the best painter of all’.

In making that last judgment, however, Dürer may not have been completely up to speed. In 1506, the elderly Bellini was being challenged by Giorgione, so much so that the wily old fellow eventually incorporated some aspects of the younger man’s style into his own. Indeed, around the time Dürer wrote his letter, Giorgione was influencing so many other artists that it is now very hard to say which are by whom. As Per Rumberg, the curator of the RA exhibition, ruefully explains, ‘Usually the disagreement between scholars about attributions is around the fringes; with Giorgione it’s at the core.’

Wisely, therefore, the exhibition is not simply devoted to Giorgione himself but to his era, in which a new kind of painting emerged in Venice — which, for want of a better word, is dubbed ‘Giorgionesque’. It will contain some pictures that most agree are by Giorgione, others that might possibly be by him, still more that are fairly definitely the work of other artists such as the young Titian and Bellini. One, a portrait of an unknown man from Berlin in a smart violet doublet, is widely believed to be a Giorgione (but, as it happens, Per Rumberg himself believes it is by Titian).

There are a few solid clues, however, to the truth about Giorgione. At the start of the Royal Academy exhibition will be a tiny image of an anonymous man, often dubbed the Terris Portrait, from the name of a previous owner, a Scottish coal merchant. This is close in Giorgione terms to a Rosetta Stone, albeit an ambiguous one. On the back, early in the 16th century, someone wrote the words ‘by the hand of Zorzi da chastel fr[anco]’, ‘Zorzi’ being a Venetian version of Giorgione. There follows a date, which starts ‘15’, but then gets much less legible.

This is a typical Giorgione conundrum. The Terris Portrait is among the most certain among that tiny group of paintings almost everyone agrees on — because of those words on the back. There are no signed Giorgiones, and only one other with a similar contemporary inscription naming him as the artist and giving a date. The snag is in the smudging of the last two digits: some connoisseurs have confidently read it as ‘1510’, others as ‘1508’. Per Rumberg laments, ‘So here we have a date but we can’t read it!’

The consensus at the moment, however, is that the date is ‘1506’, so just about the time Dürer was writing home to Nuremberg. His Italian friends, Dürer confided, advised him not to eat and drink with the Venetian painters (the patriarchal Bellini apart), perhaps in case they took the opportunity to poison him. Their behaviour, in Dürer’s view, was low. ‘Many of them are my enemies and copy my work in the churches and wherever they can find it; afterwards they criticize it and claim that it is not done in the antique style and say it is no good.’

The Terris Portrait supports this charge, but only up to a point. It was painted by someone who had learned the lessons of northern masters such as Dürer, for example in the wonderfully delicate softness of the sitter’s hair in which it seems to be possible to count each strand. Giorgione probably did have a good look at any paintings he could find by Dürer (and might well have disapproved of their lack of classical style).

Giorgione must also have experienced the work of Leonardo da Vinci, who had passed through Venice in 1500. Per Rumberg explains, ‘We are not sure if they met, but the Terris Portrait suggests they did, and that Giorgione learned his lesson.’ The smoky, blurry shadows of the man in the Terris Portrait do indeed make him look a little like a male Mona Lisa.

So Giorgione made his new art out of high-quality ingredients — a touch of Dürer, a soupçon of Leonardo, a solid foundation of Bellini and Roman antiquity. But there is something else you feel in a painting such as the National Gallery’s ‘Il Tramonto (The Sunset)’. In the landscape behind some enigmatic figures, a single sapling is silhouetted against the rosy glow in the sky. The story the picture once told has been lost (and further confused by a 20th-century restorer who added a St George and dragon). But the elegiac mood lingers in your mind. ‘Giorgione was a very quiet artist and very emotional,’ Per Rumberg concludes, ‘interested in very personal encounters.’ That’s perhaps about as close as you can get to defining the Giorgionesque effect.

Originally published in The Spectator