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All posts tagged Henry Scott Tuke
Seen and Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame @ Guildhall Art Gallery
This is an exhibition of artworks on a subject which is so straightforward, so hidden in plain sight, that it is easily overlooked – children.
To be precise, children in Victorian art.
Victorian Children in the Frame
Guildhall Art Gallery has brought together nearly fifty paintings from the long nineteenth century – approximately 1810 to 1910 – which demonstrate some of the ways in which children were depicted by artists during this long period of tumultuous social change.
The exhibition space consists of two large rooms divided into 'alcoves' or sections, each devoted to a different aspect of the painted imagery of children 1810-1910. At the start there is a timeline showing the major legal and educational reforms which affected children through the nineteenth century.
Timeline for Seen and Heard at the Guildhall
Before the 19th century children were depicted in art works as miniature adults. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837 children were being depicted more realistically, shown playing with toys or pets. Childhood began to be seen as a distinct and particularly valuable period of life, and children – middle and upper-class children, anyway – as needing coddling and protecting.
It should be mentioned early on that the majority of the 46 or so paintings on display are of a quite mind-boggling soppy sentimentality. The commentary doesn't mention it but the Cult of Sentiment which had arisen in aristocratic circles in the late 18th century carried on and came to full bloom in some extraordinarily sickly paintings during the 19th century. Chocolate box doesn't begin to describe them. They may be too sickly sweet for many modern tastes.
That said the exhibition includes a large number of artists, most of whom will be unknown and, since every picture has a useful and informative label, reading them all gives you a good sense of the range and diversity (or lack of it) during the period.
And it's really interesting to see what inhabitants of distant historical periods liked, commissioned and paid for. Sharpens your sense of the enormous cultural changes which took place during this period, and which separate us from that distant time.
This first section includes:
John Strange and Sarah Ann Williams (1830) by John R. Wildman
The Artist's son (1820) by Martin Archer Shee
Boy and Rabbit (1814) by Sir Henry Raeburn
Boy and Rabbit (1814) by Sir Henry Raeburn © the Royal Academy
Children in poverty
There is a slight disconnect in the exhibition between its wall labels and the actual content. The labels emphasise that throughout the period tens of thousands of children suffered from malnutrition, illness, abuse and overwork. And right at the start of the show there is a big display panel listing the major legislation passed during the 19th century with the twin aims of:
protecting protect children from exploitation and
educating them
This explains that free state education for the under-10s wasn't available until 1870, while it was only in 1874 that children under the age of ten were forbidden from working in factories. These and other basic historical facts make for startling reading.
However, when you turn from the information texts to the pictures you discover that the exhibition itself has almost no paintings of working children, apart from a handful showing romanticised road sweeps and shoe polishers.
There is no depiction whatsoever of children working in coalmines or in any of the hundreds of thousands of factories which sprang up across the land, in any trades or of the thousands of under-age girls who worked as prostitutes.
There's no depiction of the kind of workhouse described in Oliver Twist or the bullying junior schools shown in Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield.
Instead this section contains some more chocolate-boxy images:
Cottage children (1804) by William Owen
The Pet Lamb (1813) by William Collins
Orphans (1885) by Thomas Benjamin Kennington
Orphans (1885) by Thomas Benjamin Kennington © Tate
Compare this painting by Thomas Kennington with the Raeburn above. It is interesting to observe the difference in technique between the early and later part of the century (Raeburn 1814, Kennington 1885), the way a Thomas Lawrence-type softness has given way to a style more roughly painted and with more realistic details (the ragged trousers, the hole in the floor).
But it's still desperately sentimental, though, isn't it? Still the same rosy red cheeks and catchlights in the eyes.
The commentary suggests that the British public was sentimental about animals long before it cared about poor children, pointing out that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in England in 1824, whereas the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children wasn't founded till 1884.
The commentary claims that children and animals became increasingly associated as the sentimental Victorian era progressed, but I personally wasn't convinced of that. One of my all time favourite paintings is Gainsborough's depiction of his two daughters with a cat, on show at the National Portrait Gallery's recent exhibition of Gainsborough portraits – and this dates from 1760.
Mary and Margaret Gainsborough, the artist's daughter, with a cat by Thomas Gainsborough (1760-61) © The National Gallery, London
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the association of sweet little children and sweet little animals became more mass produced, a shameless catering to the sentimentalism of the new Victorian mass public. In this show it is exemplified in Millais's couple of paintings, My First Sermon and My Second Sermon, showing the sweetest of innocent little Victorian girls sitting in her smart Sunday best. This was a madly successful painting which was widely distributed in the form of prints and reproductions.
My First Sermon (1863) oil on canvas by John Everett Millais (1829-1896) Courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
Also in this section are:
The First Leap (1829) by Sir Edwin Landseer
Portrait of a Young Girl (1891) by William Powell Frith
The Music Lesson (1877) by Frederick Leighton
Sun and Moonflowers (1889) by George Dunlop Leslie
Sympathy (1878) by Briton Riviere
Sympathy (1878) by Briton Riviere © Tate
What more nostalgic and anodyne image could you conceive than the innocent children of unspoilt crofters fishing by a clear crystal stream or playing harmless games in a rural garden, as depicted here.
But as the century progressed the notion of 'play' became commercialised and integrated into a capitalist economy. Playrooms were built in posh houses, playgrounds were built in new housing developments, the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 gave parents special days to spend with their children.
A further development was the invention of seaside resorts, in the first half of the century only for the rich but leading to the development of increasingly popular resorts like Blackpool, Scarborough and Brighton. The paintings in this section capture all phases of this development but with the emphasis mostly on some really cheesy scenes of innocent rural play.
The Nutting Party (1831) by William Collins
Borrowdale, Cumbria (1821) by William Collins
the Kitten Deceived (1816) by William Collins
Try This Pair (1864) by Frederick Daniel Hardy
Gran's Treasures (1866) by George Bernard O'Neill
The Playground (1852) by Thomas Webster
The Swing (1865) by Myles Birket Foster
The Hillside (gathering foxgloves) by Myles Birket Foster
Foster was a skilled watercolourist who painted scenery around his Surrey home of Witley. Looks wonderfully idyllic, doesn't it, but not much to do with the themes of the commercialisation of holidays and recreation time mentioned in the wall labels.
Children of city, country and coast
The commentary points out the population explosion which characterised the 19th century, and that most of it took place in new towns and cities. This big increase in population gave rise to hair-raising infant mortality statistics as newborns and toddlers fell prey to the diseases of humans crushed together in cramped, insanitary conditions – typhoid, cholera and the like.
However – counter-intuitively – instead of showing paintings of this squalor and disease, the commentary uses these facts to explain a section depicting children at the seaside, including:
Children at the Seaside (1910) by Frank Gascoigne Heath
John, Everard and Cecil Baring (1872) by James Sant
3rd Lord Evelstoke as a Boy (1871) by E. Tayleur
The Bonxie, Shetland (1873) by James Clarke Hook
Word fromt he Missing (1877) by James Clarke Hook
Shrimp Boys at Cromer (1815) by William Collins
Ruby, Gold and Malachite (1902) by Henry Scott Tuke
Georgie and Richard Fouracre (1889) by Henry Scott Tuke
Two Children on Deck (1894) Henry Scott Tuke
This latter trio of works makes Tuke, a leading member of the Newlyn School, with his strongly homoerotic portrayals of teenage boys, possibly the most represented artist here.
Ruby, Gold and Malachite was one of the handful of paintings here which really stood out as serious masterpieces which hold their own today. But then it is debatable whether it is about childhood at all. The naked boys are no longer toddlers but on the verge of manhood and that, surely, is part of its appeal.
Pondering the difference between childhood and adolescence made me realise that the exhibition doesn't actually give a working definition of 'childhood' which is, in fact, a problematic category. There is a vast difference between 6 and 16.
Ruby, Gold and Malachite (1902) by Henry Scott Tuke © City of London Corporation
I was really struck by this work, An October Morning (1885) by Walter Frederick Osborne, an artist who studied in France in the 1870s and 1880s and brought the plein air approach back to Britain.
An October Morning (1885) by Walter Frederick Osborne. Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
Really looking at this painting I realised that what it has in common with the Tuke painting is that both have a matt finish, very unlike the shiny and slickly finished super-gloss finish of a Millais or Riviere.
This alone helps to account for the mournful atmosphere of the painting, although it is obviously also due the artfully sombre palettes of browns and greys. In its own way it may be Victorian chocolate box, but I felt it had more soul than most of the other paintings on display.
Off to one side, not part of any particular topic, are a couple of monster large paintings including the beautiful landscape titled The Thames From Richmond Hill, London (1905) by Ernest Albert Waterlow. This appeared to be in the exhibition chiefly here because it has been subjected to recent restoration, which is thoroughly explained by a lengthy wall label.
Nearby was an altogether darker and morbid painting, The Man with the Scythe (1896) by Henry Herbert La Thangue.
The Man with the Scythe (1896) by Henry Herbert La Thangue © Tate
La Thangue was, apparently, famous for the realism of his late-Victorian rustic scenes, mostly of workaday life. This one has an unusual symbolism about it. It's not easy to see in this reproduction, and was hard to see in the lowered light of the gallery, but at the end of the path, on the right, is a man with a scythe, and the assumption is that the little girl in the chair has just died.
The emphasis on death and the whiteness of the girl's dress and pillow link it with a number of European Symbolist painters of the time.
In 1851 fewer than 50% of children in Britain attended school. In fact the provision of education was incredibly haphazard until the end of the century. Until then there was no system, instead each region had highly localised and overlapping education facilities which might include factory schools (which provided two hours a day education but only after the end of the eight-hour working day), Dame Schools run by spinster women, Ragged schools for the very poorest which taught survival-level writing and reading, private day schools with low fees and notoriously low standards, and a wide range of schools run by local charities, by the Church of England, the Quakers and so on.
Only the middle and upper classes bothered to educate their children beyond the age of 11 and were able to afford the fees for governesses or private tutors, grammar schools, preparatory and public schools. In Victorian society, the well educated were, then, in a tiny majority.
Only with the Education Act of 1870 were local authorities finally put under the obligation to provide free education for every child under 10. Only in 1880 was attendance at school between the ages of five and 13 made compulsory, and it was not until 1891 that education was provided free for all.
Fascinating stuff but, once again, the paintings which 'illustrate' these facts are mawkishly twee and sentimental.
A Dame's School (1845) by Daniel Webster
Alone (1902) by Theophile Duverger
Two Children at Drawing Lessons (1850s) by Daniel Pasmore
The Smile (1841) by Thomas Webster
The Frown (1841) by Thomas Webster
In the first of this pair of paintings the children are happily smiling and pleasing their teacher. The second shows the same row of little tinkers in various stages of frowning and looking unhappy. Aaaah. Sweet.
Children at work
Though the birth rate declined during the 19th century as a result of improvements in medicine and education, nonetheless at one point about a third of the population was under the age of 15.
Victorian England was the first developing country. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution children as young as five were sent to work in city streets, country fields, docks, factories and mines. Legislation slowly raised the age at which children could be put to work and limited their working hours, but it's still a shock to learn how slowly this came about. In 1842 the Mines Act banned the use of boys under the age of ten down coalmines. So 11-year-olds could go, then. It wasn't until 1878 that children under the age of 10 were forbidden to work in factories.
But regardless of legislation, city street were full of street Arabs, homeless waifs and strays scraping a living. Henry Mayhew's astonishing multi-volumed enquiry into the lives and work and economics of street labour, London Labour and the London Poor, revealed to middle-class Victorians an astonishing proliferation of street employment and the precise demarcations and hierarchies among, for example, coster-mongers (who sold fresh fruit), mud larks (who searched for valuable scraps in the Thames mud) match girls (who sold match boxes at pitiful rates), and crossing sweepers, who swept the mud and horse poo out of the way of gentleman and ladies who wished to cross the road, for a penny a go.
The paintings on display here completely fail to capture the real misery of poverty and homelessness. Instead the painters are generally hypnotised by the sentimental notion of solitary or abandoned children, and the paintings are vehicles for tear-jerking sentiment. They may be well-intentioned but all-too-often have all the depth of a Christmas card.
The Crossing Sweeper (1858) by William Powell Frith
Shaftesbury, Lost and Found (1862) by William MacDuff
The General Post Office, one minute to six (1860) by George Elgar Hicks
A Crossing Sweeper and a Flower Girl (1884) by Augustus E. Mulready
Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away (1873) by Augustus E. Mulready
Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away (1873) by Augustus E. Mulready © Guildhall Art Gallery
Off to one side of the main two exhibition rooms is a space obviously set aside for children and school visits, with tiny tables and chair set with paper and crayons and colouring pens.
But what struck me about this space was that it didn't have any paintings in, it had prints. And the interesting thing about the prints is that they were vastly more realistic than any of the paintings in the main exhibition. Maybe realistic isn't exactly the word, since since several of them were the cartoon-style illustrations of George Cruickshank, who illustrated Charles Dickens's early novels.
Field Lane Ragged School, London, c1850 by George Cruikshank
What I mean is that, although quite a few of the wall labels in the main exhibition described at length the awful conditions for children in the cramped, crowded, filthy squalid new cities thrown up by the Industrial Revolution, none of the paintings really show this, none of them show children working in factories, down the mines, up chimneys etc.
Presumably this is because Art, Fine Art, the Fine Art of Painting, was required by Victorian critics and theorists to show morally and spiritually and religiously uplifting scenes. Hence the glut of happy children in idyllic rural scenes and, even when a painting does show street sweepers, it's under a melancholy moon on the empty Blackfriars bridge with a view of the romantic Thames in the background i.e. sweetened and sentimentalised.
So it was left to the illustrators and lithographers and print-makers, the cartoonists and illustrators, of Dickens and numerous other mid-Victorian novelists, to actually show what conditions were like in the crowded streets, in bare attics and crowded workhouses and schools which permanently bordered on bedlam, as in the Cruikshank illustration above.
In other words, it was only when I'd finished going round the exhibition a couple of times, and examined the prints in the children's activity room a few times, that it dawned on me that paintings might not be a very good medium in which to explore the social history of children during the Victorian era.
In fact, society and critics' and artists' views about a) what childhood ought to be and b) what a good painting ought to be, actively prevented painting from being an accurate record of the times.
It is a good record of the (to us, largely false and sentimental) taste of the Victorians. But as to what conditions were actually like for the working poor, it may well be that the illustrators tell us more than any painter ever could.
Meditations in Monmouth Street, 1839, by George Cruikshank
For me these prints linked directly to the acute depictions of London's street children made by the woman artist Edith Farmiloe nearly sixty years later, and as recently featured in a fascinating exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum. Prints and illustrations – that's where the social historian should be looking, rather than at sickly sweet paintings.
A Make-Believe Margate by Edith Farmiloe (1902)
Seen and Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame continues at Guildhall Art Gallery until 28 April 2019
Other guildhall reviews
Unseen City: Photos by Martin Parr @ Guildhall Art Gallery (March 2016)
Every room in the Guildhall Art Gallery (February 2016)
Age of Elegance: 1890 – 1930 @ the Guildhall Art Gallery (April 2012)
by Simon on March 21, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, History
Tagged 1870 Education Act, art, Augustus E. Mulready, Briton Riviere, Charles Dickens, children, Daniel Pasmore, Daniel Webster, David Copperfield, E. Tayleur, Edith Farmiloe, education, Edwin Landseer, Ernest Albert Waterlow, exhibition, Frank Gascoigne Heath, Frederick Daniel Hardy, Frederick Leighton, Gainsborough, George Bernard O'Neill, George Cruickshank, George Dunlop Leslie, George Elgar Hicks, Gold and Malachite, Guildhall Art Gallery, Heath Robinson Museum, Henry Herbert La Thangue, Henry Mayhew, Henry Scott Tuke, illustrators, Industrial revolution, industrialisation, James Clarke Hook, James Sant, John Everett Millais, John R. Wildman, London Labour and the London Poor, Martin Archer Shee, Millais, Myles Birket Foster, National Portrait Gallery, National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Nicholas Nickleby, nineteenth century, Oliver Twist, painting, paintings, poverty, Queen Victoria, Ruby, Seen and Heard, Seen and Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame, sentimentality, Sir Henry Raeburn, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Symbolism, Theophile Duverger, Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Thomas Webster, Victorian age, Victorian era, Walter Frederick Osborne, William Collins, William MacDuff, William Owen, William Powell Frith, Witley
Posted by Simon on March 21, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/21/seen-and-heard-victorian-children-in-the-frame-guildhall-art-gallery/
Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain
Female Figure Lying on Her Back
Can you tell whether this painting was done by a man or a woman, lesbian or gay, bisexual or transsexual?
And does it matter?
If by a man, is it a horrible example of the Male Gaze, encouraging male 'ownership' and mastery of the female figure, encouraging lascivious thoughts in the male viewer, reducing women to sexualised objects, exploiting women for semi-pornographic purposes?
If by a woman, is it a joyously unashamed celebration of the female body, the lazy posture and yawning stretch of the subject marvellously capturing a moment of real, unvarnished intimacy?
Does knowledge of the painter's gender or sexual orientation change your 'reading' of this picture, your enjoyment of it, your 'understanding' of it? And why?
These are just some of the questions raised by this fascinating and thought-provoking exhibition.
I was a member of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality back in the 1970s, going on marches, signing petitions, habituating Windsor's only gay pub, campaigning for gay rights, the central one being getting the age of gay consent brought down in line with the age for straights. In the years since, I've supported gay marriage, gay and women priests, and so on. It's always been obvious to me that LGBT people should be treated absolutely the same as anyone else, and benefit from exactly the same rights and life opportunities. I am not myself gay, but it's always seemed obvious to me that a) no-one should judge any form of sexual practice among consenting adults b) no-one should be allowed to discriminate in any way against anyone on account of their sexual orientation or sexual practices.
The jargon of desire
In the late 1960s French structuralist literary criticism began to morph into post-structuralist criticism and theory. Reflecting the move from the politicised 1960s into the more narcissistic 1970s, and an ongoing obsession with Freudian psychoanalysis – and also being French and proud of it – a lot of this criticism became more personal, about identity, as constituted in texts and wider society, and a lot more about sex.
The works of literary critics like Roland Barthes (b.1915, The Pleasure of the Text), the historian Michel Foucault (b.1926 A History of Sexuality), the philosopher Jacques Derrida (b.1930), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (b.1901), feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous (b.1937) and Julia Kristeva (b.1941 Desire in language), and the pioneer of Queer Studies, Judith Butler (b.1956, Subjects of desire, Gender trouble, Undoing gender), plus many others have led to the vast proliferation of the 'discourse of desire', to countless books and articles and conferences and degree and postgraduate courses about gender and sexuality, demonstrating how this, that or the other work of art or fiction or film 'subverts' or 'challenges' or 'confronts' gender conventions and 'transgresses' gender stereotypes and 'rewrites' gender narratives.
With the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, young students wanting to prove how rebellious and subversive they were found themselves bereft of an ideological alternative to consumer capitalism, and so found themselves forced towards the only two games in town, anti-sexism and anti-racism, embodied in Women's Studies/Gender Studies, and Post-Colonial Studies, respectively.
For at least thirty years humanities departments – literature, art, philosophy – have been teaching courses showing how all Western writing, art, philosophy was riddled with racist/sexist assumptions, and built on evil imperialism and slavery. Many graduates of these courses, imbued with this way of thinking, moved on into the media and press, into film and theatre and the art world, where in the pages of the Guardian or the Huffington Post or the Independent, and in galleries and theatres across the West, they can be seen every day writing scandalised articles, producing documentaries, putting on plays angry about the persistence of sexism and racism and homophobia.
But there are more women than immigrants in this country and, as a result, more Feminist Studies, Women's Studies, Gender Studies courses than Post-Colonial courses – and so books and articles and films and documentaries about the multiple unfairnesses and injustices perpetrated on women throughout the ages by the ever-present Patriarchy, continue to thrive and proliferate.
On one level this exhibition represents a triumph of this kind of discourse, a discourse a) obsessed by sex, conceived of in a rather dry and boring theoretical way b) driven and animated by a fathomless sense of grievance and injustice. Exhibitions about any aspect of sexuality represent a perfect marriage of victim politics with the high-flown 'discourse of desire'.
Why use the word 'queer'?
To quote the curators:
Queer has a mixed history – from the 19th century onwards it has been used both as a term of abuse and as a term by LGBT people to refer to themselves. Our inspiration for using it came from Derek Jarman who said that it used to frighten him but now 'for me to use the word queer is a liberation'. More recently, of course, it has become reclaimed as a fluid term for people of different sexualities and gender identities. Historians of sexuality have also argued that it is preferable to other terms for sexualities in the past as these often don't map onto modern sexual identities. In addition to carrying out audience research, we took advice from Stonewall and other LGBT charities and held focus groups with LGBT people. The advice from all of these sources was overwhelmingly that we should use it. While we tried other titles, no other option captured the full diversity of sexualities and gender identities that are represented in the show.
What is a queer work of art?
Does it have to portray a homosexual or lesbian act i.e. be pornographic (as a small number of the works here do, some rude sketches by Keith Vaughan and the super well-known big phalluses of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations to Lysistrata)?
Illustrations to Lysistrata by Aubrey Beardsley (1896)
Is queer art any work by an overtly gay or lesbian or bi or trans artist? But how many Victorian and Edwardian and Georgian painters thought of themselves in those terms? Don't the curators run the risk of – in fact aren't they running headlong into – defining, naming and limiting people from the past a) by our own modern 2017 categories of sexuality (Yes); and b) of defining people entirely by their 'sexuality', whatever that is. I thought that was precisely what CHE and Gay Rights and their successors were trying to escape from: from being tied down, limited, constrained and defined solely in terms of your sexual preferences, as if that were the only important part of your life, as if society is correct to pigeonhole all of us on the basis of this one attribute.
And what if the queer artist's subject matter is not only not particularly erotic, what if it's not even of human body? For example, is this queer art?
Lilac and guelder rose by Gluck
Hannah Gluckstein, known as Gluck (1895 – 1978) was a lesbian painter. So is her painting of flowers a work of queer art?
Should queer art also include works which just look 'sort of' homoerotic or a bit lesbian, either a) in the eyes of contemporary viewers (in which case it might have caused a 'scandal' and 'shocked Victorian society'), or b) in the eyes of modern curators trained to spot the slightest sign of gender stereotypes being 'subverted' and gender norms being 'transgressed' and narratives of heterosexuality being 'questioned' and 'interrogated'?
Either way, categorising art in terms of the audience's response to it, is dicey. What constitutes 'art' has changed out of all recognition the past 150 years. People's responses to 'art' have become similarly complex and varied.
Tricky questions. In the event, this exhibition includes works chosen by all these criteria, and more.
The drawbacks of telling history through art
This decade Tate Britain has run a series of exhibitions based not around artists or movements, but on broad themes and topics. Thus they've staged exhibitions about: folk art, the aesthetic of ruins, the British Empire, Victorian sculpture, the destruction of art works, the depiction of war. Many of them had an amusingly random element, delicate watercolours of Tintern Abbey placed next to vast photos of Nazi war bunkers (Ruin Lust), or some maps of the Empire next to some flags of the Empire next to random artifacts from the Empire (Artist and Empire).
Although they put a brave face on it, the cumulative impression of visiting all these shows raises the suspicion that the curators are under orders to find pretexts to bring out the more obscure and neglected works languishing in Tate's vast archives, and display them in exhibitions with eye-catching and 'controversial' themes.
While the aim of rotating their (doubtless huge) collection for us to view is laudable, the pretexts the curators come up with are sometimes ambitiously wide-ranging and grand-sounding, while the collection of artifacts actually on display often turns out to be rather patchy and random. The history of the British Empire is an enormous subject: the Tate exhibition about it amounted to a jumble sale of odds and sods from across the huge geographic reach and vast periods of time involved: the Empire used maps, here's some maps; the Empire had flags, here's half a dozen flags; the Empire allowed botanists and naturalists to travel the world and see exotic species so here's a painting of tiger; here's some native spears; and so on.
Although Tate calls in plentiful loans from other collections to create the exhibitions, the core of these shows tends to be focused on dusting off and displaying many of it hidden assets, themselves bought at various times for various reasons, hence the feeling they give of a patchwork quilt made from odds and ends. Sometimes it feels as if they're trying do a vast jigsaw without most of the pieces.
Written histories can conjure up anything with words, creating continuities, linking themes and ideas at will: in words, anything is possible. Histories told through objects, however, immediately limit which areas can be covered, and which stories can be told, by virtue of what is available, what has survived. And histories told through works of 'art' are even more limited by the random nature of any particular art collection, as well as biases intrinsic in what kind of subjects get turned into 'art' and what don't (the experiences of most 'ordinary' people, for example, or the entire world of work, especially housework).
All these limitations apply to this exhibition, with the additional challenge that sex, sexuality, gender, desire – call it what you will – is, by and large, quite a private part of most people's lives. Artists and performers, by the nature of their work and output, are a kind of exception to the rule that most people keep their sex lives pretty private. And forms of sexuality which were banned by law and subject to harsh punishments are all the more likely to be hidden and suppressed, to not leave traces in the written – and especially the painted – record.
In other words, even more than Tate's other wide-ranging historical exhibitions, this one feels haunted by gaps and absences.
In 1861 the death penalty for sodomy was abolished; in 1967 sex between men was (partially) decriminalised. These provide handy end dates.
The exhibition is in eight rooms
Coded desires covers the later Victorian period. This was dominated by the Aesthetic Movement and the group of painters known as the Olympians, who specialised in sensuous paintings of lightly-clad women lounging around in a dreamy ancient Roman baths or terraces. Just thinking about either of these interlinked movements brings to mind the extraordinary sensuality present in so much art of this period, along with a worship of the classical world, in pictures and in words, which stretched towards a feel for the same-sex relationships present in, especially, the writings of the Greeks, where a sexual relationship between an older man and a younger man or boy was socially acceptable. This may or may not be present in the works here, But the bigger story about most late Victorian art is the remarkable extent to which 'desire', physical sensuousness, in all shapes and forms, was more openly depicted than ever before in this period.
The exhibition has some striking works by the king of the Olympians, Frederick Leighton, on the basis that he sometimes depicted sensual male nudes – although many of his works are characterised by sensuality for men or women.
Icarus and Daedalus (1869) by Frederic Leighton – a stunningly sensual picture: but is it gay?
The Sluggard (1885) by Frederic Leighton
Leighton was rumoured to be gay, but then again it's thought he had an affair with one of his female models. Tricky, therefore, to shoehorn him into modern categories of straight, gay, bi etc. One of the liberating things about studying history, past lives, is they did things differently, thought, wrote, spoke, painted, perceived, differently to us. Don't fit into our modern categories.
Was Lord Leighton gay?
The bulk of works in the room are by Simeon Solomon, who was unfortunate enough to be arrested in a public lavatory off Oxford Street, charged with attempting to commit sodomy and fined £100, then a year later arrested in Paris and sentenced to three months in prison. This makes him a bona fide gay hero. To the viewer, however, his works seem mostly sub-standard examples of the Olympian style done much more smoothly by the likes of Alma-Tadema or Albert Moore.
Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (1864) by Simeon Solomon (Watercolour) Tate
William Blake Richmond (1842-1921) is a painter you don't hear about much. He also painted supremely sensual paintings on sunny classical themes, e.g. Hera in the House of Hephaistos or just sumptuous late-Victorian portraits e.g. Mrs Luke Ionides. Nothing particularly 'transgressive' about these, in the way our curators want to see 'gender norms' being 'transgressed', but they've included one big painting The Bowlers.
The Bowlers by William Blake Richmond
Apparently, this scandalised the Victorians (didn't everything 'scandalise' the Victorians?) for its inclusion of naked women (you can see some breasts) and naked men in the same scene. And some of the men have their arms round each other. Shock horror. Richmond was married and wasn't arrested in any toilets, so not a transgressive hero per se. After looking at it for a while I noticed the way a line drawn along the top of the heads of the figures on the right forms a diagonal going down towards the centre of the composition, while the heads of the women on the left line up as a mirror diagonal heading down towards the centre: at the very centre is a black vase against a thick central pillar, to the left of which is a woman in a see-through toga and on the right the zigzagging black trunk of a wisteria tree. Which means or symbolises? Who knows.
My favourite things in this room were the three paintings by the marvellous Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929). Tuke was one of a group of artists who settled in Newlyn in Cornwall and painted en plein air. Almost all are of young men, nude or half-undressed, by the sparkling sea in the sunshine. In the permanent gallery upstairs they display August Blue (1893), a wonderful composition in terms of the draughtsmanship of the figures, also the figurative accuracy of the rowboat and the ships on the horizon, and also of course the wonderfully clear blues and greens – you can smell the sea, you can feel the sun on your skin. There are three of his paintings here alongside a cabinet showing some of the many photographs he took of gorgeous-looking young men.
The Critics (1927) by Henry Scott Tuke. Warwick District Council (Leamington Spa, UK)
Public indecency 'looks at ways in which sexuality and gender identity did – and did not – go public from the 1880s to the 1920s.'
Thus we have the trial of Oscar Wilde (who has not heard of the trial of Oscar Wilde? How many films have been made of it?) the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall for her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), and we get some of Aubrey Beardsley's 'scandalous' illustrations for the Greek play Lysistrata thrown in.
This is the kind of thing you should learn in 6th form and certainly early in an English or humanities degree course, so that you can tut and fret and criticise horrible dead white men for repressing 'transgressive' sexualities. But it's worth remembering that this period also saw the persecution of male heterosexual artists as well – James Joyce's Ulysses went on trial in 1921 because of its description of a man masturbating, the police raided an exhibition of paintings by D.H. Lawrence and (admittedly not in England) the Austrian artist Egon Schiele was arrested and 100 of his art works were confiscated – one of them was burned by the judge in court in front of the artist -for their sexual explicitness.
It was an era when many artists of all persuasions were pushing at the boundaries of what society thought was acceptable depiction of sexuality, and many artists, gay, straight or what-have-you – fell foul of the authorities.
Alongside the Wilde and Beardsley are testaments to the work of the sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis, who collaborated with the gay writer John Addington Symonds on his book Sexual Inversion (1896). These 'scientific' works can either be seen (optimistically) as the start of a 'modern' liberal attitude to a wide range of sexual practices or (pessimistically) as 'science' and the State beginning to move into areas of private life, with a view to defining and categorising all possible practices (or perversions as they'd have been called) and the human 'types' which engage in them.
You don't have to be Michel Foucault to suspect that the 'liberating' effects of writing about varieties of sexuality can be accompanied by new types of definition, surveillance and control.
Theatrical types The theatre and performing arts have long offered a refuge for exhibitionists, people who like to dress up, fantasise, play act and generally behave in ways which would not be acceptable in everyday life. So the theatre has long attracted gay men and this room features photos of famous performers who were gay, photographers who were gay, with a special case devoted to cross-dressing entertainers.
There's a lot of photos by Angus McBean (1904-90) the fabulous b&w photographer, who did lots of semi-surreal fashion shots before the war (his 'surrealised portraits'), was arrested in 1942 for homosexual acts and served two years in gaol, before emerging to resume his career post-war in a rather more traditional vision. But everything he did is touched by class and style. The show includes a typically weird portrait of the now-forgotten actor Robert Helpmann as Hamlet, though I know him for his appearances in Powell and Pressburger's two extraordinary films, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann.
Robert Helpmann as Hamlet by Angus McBean (1948)
The British have a problem with sex, full stop, whether straight or gay, and have long had a reputation for gross hypocrisy, with the 'respectable' classes enforcing repressive laws at home then vacationing in Paris where they could sleep with countless courtesans (as squeaky clean Charles Dickens was reputed to do and the heir to the throne, Prince Albert certainly did) or swanning off to North Africa, to Algeria or Morocco where there was an endless supply of boys for sex.
This nervousness, shame and embarrassment may be part of what lies behind the long tradition of men dressing up as women for vaudeville entertainment, a tradition which goes back a long way, but is certainly present in the Victorian music hall, through the pre-war years and was still going strong in my boyhood in figures like Danny La Rue, Dick Emery ('Oh you are awful… but I like you!'), Kenny Everett ('and then all my clothes fell off!'), Dame Edna Everage, Lily Savage. And that's without mentioning the vast tradition of English pantomime with its Widow Twanky and Ugly Sisters, traditionally played by men and a huge opportunity for all kinds of blue, risqué and 'transgender' comedy.
A display case here presents a dozen or so photos and posters illustrating some of the cross-dressing stars of yore, most of which I'd never heard of simply because they were before the days of TV. Here, as elsewhere in the show (and as often in the Tate 'history' exhibitions) you feel this is an absolutely vast subject which has been only briefly sketched and hinted at, and possibly not one which is necessarily best approached through the medium of 'art' at all.
Douglas Byng (1934) by Paul Tanqueray. Vintage bromide print © Estate of Paul Tanqueray
Bloomsbury and beyond I am prejudiced against Bloomsbury because of their snobbery and their smug, self-congratulatory elitism. They all slept with each other and described each other, in private letters and public reviews, as geniuses. What's lasted has tended to be the writings of figures on the periphery – the economics of John Maynard Keynes, the novels of E.M. Forster, the novels of Virginia Woolf, though she was a core member. The art work of figures like Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell (recently featured in a handsome exhibition at the Dulwich Picture House), Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, hasn't really stood the test of time.
The catalogue says this room is meant to represent:
a generation of artists and sitters exploring, confronting and coming to terms with themselves and their desires.
Which makes it sound much more exciting and dynamic than most of their sleepy decorative pictures. Ethel Sands's Tea with Sickert symbolises everything pretty, decorative and forgettable which I tend not to like about Bloomsbury art. Perhaps I just can't slow myself down to this atmosphere of coma-like inaction. The commentary on the other hand, because Sands was in a queer relationship with fellow painter Nan Hudson, claims it is a 'quietly subversive' work, with 'queer undercurrents'. Can you spot the queer undercurrents?
Tea with Sickert (1911) by Ethel Sands
John Gielgud's Room (1933) by Clare Atwood
The commentary makes the case that, although not overtly sexual in the least, these tranquil interiors are a) painted by queer artists and b) if you look closely, very closely, you can see small hints and traces of 'queer lives' which 'history has long neglected'. Maybe…
That said, I did find myself, on repeated viewings and to my surprise, warming to the selection of works by Duncan Grant on show here. These ranged from small, explicitly gay pornographic sketches to a vast mural, commissioned to decorate the dining room of the new Borough Polytechnic in 1911.
It's a huge work – and the more I looked at it the more I admired the mix of abstract and figurative elements to achieve an overall decorative effect, and came to understand that it follows the action of a single diver from standing poised on the shore, at right, through diving in, and swimming to the boat which he clambers into at top left.
Bathing (1911) by Duncan Grant © Tate
Similarly, I was impressed by the sheer size of the massive Excursion of Nausicaa by Dame Ethel Walker. It's 18 metres wide by almost 4 high and makes a dramatic impact. It's just as well a bench is provided for you to sit and take it all in. Although, when you look closer, it seems an uncomfortable mix of Gauguin-style primitivism with Art Deco style neo-classical figures, it is still at first sight, an enormous and confident composition.
The excursion of Nausicaa by Ethel Walker (1920)
There is a vibrant portrait by Glyn Warren Philpot (1884–1937) of his servant, Henry Thomas (1935). Note: his servant. In fact there were half a dozen Philpots scattered through the show, though this is the most vivid.
Henry Thomas (1935) by Glyn Warren Philpot
Similarly, the South African artist Edward Wolfe is represented by a portrait of Pat Nelson, his model and thought to be his gay lover.
Portrait of Pat Nelson by Edward Wolfe
The Bloomsburyites' pursuit of 'unconventional' sexual arrangements (i.e. being bisexual, living with several lovers at once etc) through the Great War and into the twenties, led in to the cultural dominance of gay writers, poets and artists during the 1930s, given extra bite by the availability of the 'decadent' Weimar Republic in post-war Germany, whither trekked a generation of young gay men like Auden, Christopher Isherwood and so on.
Defying convention This room shows how early 20th century British artists 'challenged gender norms' i.e. by being lesbians, living with other women, having 'open marriages' and so on. For example, Laura Knight, the curators claim, in this picture is laying 'claim to traditional masculine sources of artistic authority by depicting [herself] in the act of painting nude female models'. It's another very big painting and very red.
Self portrait and Nude (1913) by Laura Knight. National Portrait Gallery
There is a factual background to the image in that Knight was prevented from attending the life classes at Nottingham Art College because she was a woman; only when she moved to Newlyn was she able to hire life models, and so this composition is a sort of act of defiance. That changes our attitude to the image. Still, in and of itself, would you know that it lays claims to masculine sources of artistic authority, if it hadn't been carefully explained. Maybe…
Anyway, on pretexts solid or flimsy, a number of big, colourful and attractive works are on show in this room, especially of the phenomenally posh women who populated early 20th century feminism.
Lady with a Red Hat (1918) by William Strang – the lady being the lesbian and gardening writer Vita Sackville-West, the Honourable Mrs Harold Nicholson, Companion of Honour, daughter of the third Baron Sackville. She is holding her recently published book of poems – Poems of West and East – showing the influence of Tennyson's world-weariness, A.E. Housman's lad poems, and the childlike orientalism of John Masefield and other Georgians. They're sweet and melancholy.
Dame Edith Sitwell (1916) by Alberto Guevara – daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall, and Lady Ida Emily Augusta (née Denison), a daughter of the Earl of Londesborough and a granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort.
Romance (1920) by Cecile Walton – Walton doesn't appear to have been gay, having had two marriages (to men) but this self-portrait is 'challenging' and 'subverting' 'gender norms' surrounding birth. Having been present at the birth of my daughter, I can testify that it certainly challenges the reality of childbirth which is a lot less calm and dignified than this static scenario.
Arcadia and Soho 'London was a magnet for queer artists'.
The most striking works here are by the neglected surrealist artist Edward Burra (1905-76). According to a review of his biography, his sensibility was gay, and his closest friend was a male ballet dancer, 'but they were never lovers'. Am I alone in finding this modern inquisitiveness about the exact nature of other people's sexuality, and the precise borders of their sexual activity, prurient and controlling? Who cares? His art is weird and extra, a really stunning, outlandish vision.
Soldiers at Rye (1941) Burra incorporates masks from Venetian carnival, fabric from Spanish baroque, with a kind of sado-military hugeness to create this monstrous surreal panorama.
Izzy Orts (1937) Burra was introduced to the portside bars of Charleston, with their mix of jazz musicians, pimps and dealers, and sailors in tight-fitting uniforms. Perfect!
The opposite wall is devoted to a trio of gay artists – John Craxton, John Minton and Keith Vaughan – who were loosely described as 'neo-romantics' in the 1940s. They were certainly gay. There's a display case of overtly gay and pornographic pencil sketches by Vaughan, as well as a handful of photos he took of gorgeous young men.
Drawing of two men kissing (1958–73) by Keith Vaughan © DACS, The Estate of Keith Vaughan
At an exhibition years ago I saw a whole stand of the b&w photos Vaughan took of beautiful young men lounging around classic 1930s lidos, at Hampstead Pools or the Serpentine, and have been haunted by them ever since.
Men at Hampstead Ponds (1935)
Next to the figurative sketches are his much more abstract paintings:
Bather: August 4th 1961
Three figures
In these Vaughan seems to me to have developed a new and exciting way of depicting the (mostly male) figure. Alongside Vaughan are some lighter, more 'naive' works by John Craxton.
Head of a Greek Sailor (1940) by John Craxton © Estate of John Craxton. All rights reserved, DACS 2016. Photo credit: London Borough of Camden
Craxton, Minton and Vaughan are three interesting figures, maybe worthy of a joint exhibition some time.
Public/private lives In the decade leading up to the 1967 Sexual Offences Act gay men lived a strange twilight life. In many places gay relationships among the famous, especially the arty, were permitted – the eminent actor John Gielgud was arrested for indecency in a public toilet in 1953, was fined, released and was roundly applauded the next time he took to the stage. Maybe the most famous example was the close 'friendship' between England's leading composer Benjamin Britten and the singer Peter Pears. The fuzz couldn't go arresting the nation's premier composer. But they did continue to arrest and imprison a steady stream of less well-known gay men, creating the trickle of protest which grew louder and more widespread for the law to be repealed or abolished.
This room goes heavy on the lurid relationship of gay playwright Joe Orton and his jealous lover Kenneth Halliwell, because it ended in a garish tragedy. But in the whole room the most powerful image for me was a still from the 1961 movie Victim, a genuinely taboo-breaking work starring Dirk Bogarde as an impeccably upper-middle class lawyer married to the fragrant Sylvia Sims, but who is photographed in a compromising situation with good-looking young Peter McEnery, and blackmailed. I saw this film as a boy and it left a lasting impression of the needless pain and suffering caused by bigots and criminals given license by a stupidly interfering state. It influenced me to join the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.
Francis Bacon and David Hockney I think we all know about these bad boys. This final room gives us the opportunity to marvel again at the bleak power of Bacon's nihilistic paintings and the scratchy undergraduate humour of Hockney's early Pop style.
Life Painting for a Diploma (1962) by David Hockney © Yageo Foundation
Scholarship or prurient gossip?
As I progressed through the exhibition, reading every wall label carefully, a theme began to emerge (above and beyond the obvious ones about 'gender fluidity' and 'same-sex desire'):
'De Morgan's repeated images of Hales have encouraged speculation about the nature of their relationship…'
'There is some evidence that Henry Bishop was attracted to men…'
'Beardsley does not seem to have had relationships with men…'
'There has been much speculation about Tuke's relationships with his Cornish models although nothing has been substantiated…'
'Little is known about Meteyard's sexuality, other than the fact that he was married…'
'Leighton's sexuality has been the subject of much speculation from his own times to the present, but he guarded his privacy closely…'
'Glen Byam Shaw had almost certainly been the lover of the poet Siegfried Sassoon…'
'The exact nature of Thomas and Philpot's relationship is unknown…'
Duncan Grant's 'close friend and possible lover Paul Roche…'
'There has been a lot of speculation about the nature of Walker's relationship with the painter Clara Christian with whom she lived and worked in the 1880s although little evidence survives…'
'The poet Edith Sitwell does not seem to have had sexual relationships…'
What does it matter to an appreciation of their work what an artist did or did not do with their penis or vagina, or to someone else's penis or vagina? Why do scholars obsess about the sexual act being a vital threshold in a relationship? On one level, this breathless fascination with the precise nature of people's relationships, and whether they ever did the deed together, is just a highbrow form of gutter gossip, an educated equivalent to who's shagging who in The Only Way Is Essex or Celebrity Big Brother, little different to the tittle-tattle of the tabloid press.
On a more disturbing level, this intrusion of scholarly enquiry into the heart of people's private lives is because modern art critics and curators need to know precisely who had sex with who and when, so that they can categorise and define artists, writers, poets, photographers, performers and so on according to their tidy definitions. So that artists can be neatly arranged into canons and genres and books and essays and exhibitions about straight or gay or queer or whatever art.
'[Dirk Bogarde] never publicly affirmed a sexual identity and his personal life has to be inferred from his long relationship with his manager Tony Forwood (1915-88) with whom he shared his home.'
Has to be? Who says it has to be? Why this compulsion? Why must everyone's sexuality be nailed down and defined?
To be a bit fierce, you could say that modern art scholars and curators talk the talk about gender fluidity and multiple narratives and transgressing this, that or the other – but in practice, it is they more than any other group in British society who are obsessed with tracking down their subjects' every sexual act and desire in order to categorise, limit, define and control both artists and their works.
I found the obsessive probing into these dead people's private lives unpleasant and disturbing.
The repetition over and again, in the introductions to each room and on labels for individual works, of the phrases 'same-sex desire' and 'gender norms', all of which are 'challenged' and 'confronted' and 'transgressed', of artists 'fearlessly stripping away' convention and 'pushing the boundaries' – all this gets pretty monotonous after a while.
Luckily, the art itself is much more varied, stimulating and unexpected than the ideological monomania of the commentary would suggest. If the downside of these historically-themed Tate exhibitions is that they take on vast subjects which they then struggle to adequately cover, the upside is that they turn up all sorts of unexpected treasures by relatively unknown figures, and make you want to see more.
For example, I'd love to see an exhibition devoted to Craxton, Minton and Vaughan, exploring that strange sensibility of the 1940s, surely the most overlooked of 20th century decades. An exhibition devoted to the late Victorian 'Olympian' artists would not only be a feast of sensuality but could explore in more detail the complex areas of sexuality and sensuality which were so present in Victorian art, yet so repressed in Victorian life.
Edward Burra, can we have a show dedicated to him, please, his last retrospective was in 1973. How about a show devoted to Tuke and the Newlyn School, what a wonderful treat that would be for the dark English winter. The more I looked at the Angus McBean photos, the more wonderful they seemed – how about an exhibition of him – or a broader exhibition about Theatre and Photography? Or, as simple an idea as 'Neglected Women Artists 1860-1960', showcasing the work of less well-known women artists (Laura Knight, Cecile Walton, Ethel Walker) from this era, gay, straight or whatever.
In conclusion, I was irritated by the curator-speak but I thought it was a wonderful show, went back to see it twice, bought the catalogue, and am still being pleasantly beguiled by many of the wonderful paintings, large and small, brash or quiet. What an extraordinary, and huge, contribution gay/lesbian/queer artists have made to every aspect of British culture.
Queer British Art 1861-1967 continues at Tate Britain until 1 October 2017
A queer walk through British Art at Tate
Five stories of queer artists
What does LGBTQ+ mean?
Reviews of other Tate exhibitions
David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
Georgia O'Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
John Martin exhibition @ Tate Britain (December 2011)
by Simon on April 28, 2017 • Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition
Tagged Angus McBean, art, Aubrey Beardsley, Campaign for Homosexual Equality, Cecile Walton, D.H. Lawrence, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dame Edna Everage, Danny La Rue, David Hockney, desire, Dick Emery, Dirk Bogarde, Douglas Byng, Duncan Grant, Edward Burra, Edward Wolfe, Egon Schiele, Ethel Walker, exhibition, Francis Bacon, Frederick Leighton, gay, gay marriage, gay rights, Gender Studies, Gluck, Glyn Warren Philpot, Hannah Gluckstein, Havelock Ellis, Hélène Cixous, Henry Scott Tuke, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, James Joyce, Joe Orton, John Addington Symonds, John Craxton, John Minton, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Keith Vaughan, Kenneth Halliwell, Kenny Everett, Laura Knight, lesbian, LGBT, Lily Savage, Michel Foucault, Oscar Wilde, Paul Tanqueray, Post-Colonial Studies, queer, Queer British Art, Radclyffe Hall, Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, Roland Barthes, Simeon Solomon, Tate Britain, the Aesthetic Movement, the Newlyn School, the Olympians, The Well of Loneliness, Ulysses, Victim, Vita Sackville-West, William Blake Richmond, William Strang, Women's Studies
Posted by Simon on April 28, 2017
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/04/28/queer-british-art-1861-1967-tate-britain/
Every room in the Guildhall Art Gallery
The Guildhall Art Gallery is a newish building, opened in 1999 to exhibit selections of the 4,500 or so art works owned by the Corporation of London. It replaced the original Guildhall Art Gallery which was destroyed by fire during the Second World War.
At any one time the gallery has room to exhibit about 250 artworks in its five or so spaces (the main, balcony, ground floor, corridor and undercroft galleries), as well as special exhibitions in the exhibition rooms. But the overwhelming reason to visit the Guildhall Art Gallery is to see its fabulous collection of Victorian paintings.
The gallery is FREE and there are chatty and engaging tours of the pictures every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday at 12.15, 1.15, 2.15 and 3.15.
Victorian painting
Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901) saw the fruition of the Industrial Revolution and the growth and consolidation of the British Empire, but neither of these subjects is much in evidence in the paintings here. Instead the wall labels emphasise the way Victorian artists widened the scope of painting from traditional Grand History paintings or mythological subjects or portraits of the rich, to include a new and wider variety of subjects, especially of domestic or common life treated with a new dignity or compassion, and with a growing interest, as the century progressed, in depictions of beauty for its own sake, in the work of the later pre-Raphaelites and then the Aesthetic Movement.
The Rose-Coloured Gown (1896) oil on canvas by Charles H.M. Kerr (1858-1907) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
Go through the main entrance and there is a wide staircase leading up to the Main Gallery, a big, relaxing open space lined with sumptuous Victorian paintings. They've been hung in true Victorian style, clustered one above the other and against a dark green background. It looks like this:
Main gallery at Guildhall Art Gallery
Although the paintings have labels displaying names and dates, they have no description or explanation text whatsoever, which is a change and a relief. Instead, the paintings are arranged in themes each of which is introduced by a few paragraphs setting the Victorian context.
The Toiler's Return (1877) by Albert Goodwin
Mowing Bracken (1903) by Henry Herbert La Thangue. Note the impressionistic use of broad blocks of colour. You have to stand some way back from it to get the full evocative sense of autumn light.
The Politician by Jonathan Pratt (1871). A jocular anecdote, a character from early George Eliot or Hardy.
The First London Board School (1873) by John Whitehead Walton
The Net Mender (1901) by Marianne Stokes. The more you look, the more proto-modernist this looks.
Laying monster tubes from the New River (1855) by James Baker Pyne
Quarrymen of Purbeck (1885) by Henry Tamworth Wells. Bigger than this reproduction suggests and with much more subtle or effective use of lighting.
Barmouth Sands (1835) by William Collins
The Last Evening (1873) by James Tissot. He likes his ropes and rigging.
Too young to be married (1869) by Thomas Faed
The Woodman's Daughter (1851) by John Everett Millais. Early Millais reminiscent of the awkwardness of Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) or the unreal colouring and strangely stylised pose (and medieval white stockings) of Ferdinand lured by Ariel (1850).
On the way to spring (1862) by Frederick Richard Pickersgill. Yuk.
Listed (1885) by William Henry Gore. My favourite painting here.
The Garden of Eden (1901) by Hugh Goldwin Riviere. The tour guide pointed out the irony of the title which is actually about a mismatch between a wealthy woman who has fallen for a man much below her station: note his clumpy shoes and his trousers rolled up. Also the way he's carrying not one but two umbrellas, intertwined like the two lovers and, if you look closely, the tiny raindrops hanging from the black branches.
Sea Urchins (1861) by James Clarke Hook. Horrible kitsch.
Landscape with pines (1894) by Frederick Edwin Bodkin. Reminiscent of The Devil's Punchbowl in Surrey or Black Down in Sussex.
A Peep at the metropolis from Hampstead Heath (1841) by James Baker Pyne
Try this pair (1864) by Frederick Daniel Hardy. Kitsch anecdotage.
Two children at a drawing lesson by Daniel Pasmore. Yuk.
Remembering joys that have passed away (1873) by Augustus Edwin Mulready
The first leap (1829) by Edwin Henry Landseer
Ruby, Gold and Malachite (1902) by Henry Scott Tuke. Wonderful atmospheric study of idealised, muscular young men.
An October morning (1885) by Walter Frederick Osborne
The main gallery on the first floor has an opening allowing you to look down into the gallery space below and hanging on the end wall and two stories high is the vast Defeat of the floating batteries at Gibraltar, 1782 by the American artist John Singleton Copley. Grand history painting like this is about the genre of art furthest from contemporary taste and culture, but there's lots to admire apart from the sheer scale. Rather like opera, you have to accept that the genre demands stylised and stereotyped gestures of heroism and despair, before you can really enter the spirit.
The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away (1868) oil on canvas by Frank Holl (1845-1888) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
The raising of Jairus' daughter (1895) by George Percy Jacomb-Hood. The dead woman has the pallor I associate with very late Victorian hyper-realism of the Olympians.
The youth of our Lord (1847) by John Rogers Herbert. Maybe this is the kind of thing the fierce critics of Millais' Christ in the House of His Parents (1850) wish he'd done.
Early morning in the wilderness of Shur (1860) by Frederick Goodall. A big impressive composition. The flow of the figures across the canvas is very natural but also cleverly harmonious.
The reading of the Bible by the rabbis (1882) by Jean Jules Antoine de Noüy
The temptation in the wilderness (1898) by Briton Riviere. Genuinely haunting.
Herod's birthday feast (1868) by Edward Armitage. Not a good picture – Salome's body has the absurd contrivance of a Poussin figure – but from across the room, the light is used very effectively to focus the eye onto her.
Saint Cecila by John Pettie
Naomi (1914) by Luke Fildes. I like the way the shimmeringly sensuous face merges from folds of fabric which are treated much more roughly.
Faith (1864) by John Philip
My First Sermon (1863) and My Second Sermon (1864) by John Everett Millais. Apparently, people queued round the block to see them. In 14 years Millais had come a long way from the awkward poses and strange over-colouring of The Woodman's Daughter or Christ in the House of His Parents to this chocolate-box kitsch, for which he was heartily criticised even at the time.
My First Sermon (1863) oil on canvas by John Everett Millais (1829-1896) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
As the century progressed an interest grew in Beauty for its own sake: one strand of this was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings of voluptuous, red-haired 'stunners' as he called them. Strands like this fed into the movement which became known as Art for Art's sake or Aestheticism, which sought a kind of transcendent harmony of composition and colour.
The violinist (1886) by George Adolphus Storey
La Ghirlandata (1873) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
On a fine day (1873) by Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes. Although the detail is patchy, from a distance this is staggeringly effective at conveying that very English effect of sunshine on hills while the foreground is clouded over.
The blessed damozel (1895) by John Byam Liston Shaw
The rose-coloured gown (Miss Giles) (1896) by Charles Henry Malcolm Kerr. The face is a little unflattering but the rose-coloured gown is wonderfully done, lighter and airier than this reproduction suggests. There are several histories of 'the nude'; someone ought to do a history of 'the dress', describing and explaining the way different fabrics have been depicted in art over the centuries.
A girl with fruit (1882) by John Gilbert. Crude orientalism.
spring, summer, autumn and winter (1876) by Alfred Emile Leopold Joseph Victor Stevens
Sir Thomas V. Bowater, Lord Mayor of London, Speaking at the Royal Drawing Society's Annual General Meeting at the Guildhall Art Gallery, 16 January 1914 (1914) by George Harcourt
The Guildhall from the west side (1905) by William II Luker
During the 19th century home and work became increasingly separated and distinct. Home became a place to be decorated, shown off, furnished in the latest fashions purveyed by a growing number of decoration books and magazines. There is a massive move from the bare interiors often described in Dickens's novels of the 1840s and 50s, to the fully furnished interiors and incipient consumer revolution of 1900.
Sweethearts (1892) by Walter Dendy Sadler. Late for such an anecdotal painting.
The music lesson (1877) by Frederick Leighton. Characteristically smooth and sumptuous.
A sonata of Beethoven (1912) by Alfred Edward Emslie. Is that the great man himself, blurrily depicted in the window seat?
Sun and moon flowers (1889) by George Dunlop Leslie. Note the fashionable blue and white china vases.
Clytemnestra (1882) oil on canvas by John Collier (1850-1934) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
A staggering, monumental work, down to the tricklets of blood leaking from the axe over the stone step.
A Pythagorean school invaded by Sybarites (1887) by Michele Tedesco
Lancelot du Lac (1866) John Gilbert
The Wine shop (1874), The Pyrrhic dance (1869), Pleading (1876) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
The Eve of St Agnes (1848) by William Holman Hunt
Claudio, deceived by Don John, accuses Hero (1861) by Marcus Stone
The wounded cavalier (1855) by William Shakespeare Burton
The combat by William James Grant
The execution of Lady Jane Grey (1834) by Paul Delaroche. This is a much smaller preparatory study for the final version, now in the National Gallery. It's an amazingly finished work in its own right, and breath-taking that he was able to pull off the identical effects twice.or so
Portrait of Emperor Charles V and Jeanne Vandergeynst at the cradle of their daughter, Marguerite (1870) by William Geets
The ground floor gallery
This actually consists of two tiny rooms next to the lifts, to the left of the main stairs, showing nine City of London-related works.
Ninth of November (1888) oil on canvas by William Logsdail (1859-1944) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
The tour guide pointed out the face of the boy about to pinch an orange from the basket at the far left of the crowd; the black and white minstrel complete with banjo, next to him; and to the right of the white-faced soldier at the foot of the main streetlamp, is a man in brown bowler hat, a portrait of fellow artist John William Waterhouse, of Lady of Shalott fame.
The Stock Exchange (1969) by Ken Howard
Portrait group (Sir Thodore Janssen) (1720) by a follower of Hogarth
Broadgate reflections (1989) by Brendan Neiland
The heart of Empire (1904) by Neils Moller Lund. Note, he thinks the City of London is the heart of Empire, not the follies of Westminster, far away on the horizon. I love the pigeons rising in front of the Royal Exchange.
The Stock Exchange (1966) by Roderick Jordan
Laying of the foundation stone of the Royal Exchange (1842) by an unknown artist
Cheapside 10.10 a.m., 10 February 1970 by Ken Howard
Plenty and Progress (2012) by Mark Titchner. Modern sculpture.
The undercroft galleries
As the name suggests these are downstairs from the ground floor entrance lobby. You walk along the 'long gallery' (see below), through a modern glass door on the right and down some steel and glass steps into a set of small very underground-feeling rooms. The paintings are again grouped in 'themes', although now applying across a broader chronological range than just the Victorians, stretching back to the eighteenth century and coming right up to date with a Peter Blake work from 2015.
The Thames During the Great Frost of 1739 (1739) oil on canvas by Jan Griffier the Younger (1688-1750) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
A London study (1968) by Mark Boyle. This was a diagonal slice of London pavement with a few autumn leaves stuck to it. Simple and one of the best things here.
Leadenhall market (1968) and Smithfield market (1968) by Jacqueline Stanley
Billingsgate market (1960) by Ken Howard
Market arcade (1986) by Ben Johnson. Big. Impressive.
Exmouth market (1997) by Geoffrey Fletcher
Blackberries in August (1980) by John Pearce. Impressive realism.
Walk (1995) by Oliver Bevan. Very big and somehow empty.
Chaos on London Bridge by Harold Workman. London as Trumpton.
Landscape 715 (2003) by John Virtue. More powerful than this reproduction suggests.
The Thames by moonlight with Southwark bridge (1884) by John Atkinson Grimshaw. Mr Moonlight.
The Lord Mayor's Procession by Water to Westminster, London, 9 November 1789 (1792) by Richard Paton
The Lord Mayor's show (1905) by Sir Frank William Brangwyn
The Lord Mayor's show (2015) by Peter Blake. Bang up to date and looks like a school art project.
A Civic Procession Descending Ludgate Hill, London (1879) by James Jacques Joseph Tissot
Covent Garden market (1737) by Balthasar Nebot
The Ceremony of Administering the Mayoralty Oath to Nathaniel Newnham, 8 November 1782 (1782) William Miller
The Monument from Gracechurch Street (17??) by Canaletto
The Great Fire (1666) by Waggoner
Sir Hugh Wyndham (1670) by John Michael Wright
Seems clear to me that the paintings from the 1700s are of documentary interest only. Maybe there are elements of composition and technique to analyse, but they aren't doing anything as mature, challenging and psychological as paintings like Clytemnestra, On a fine day or Listed.
Field Marshal Haig (1920) and Admiral of the Fleet Beatty (1920) by Albert Chevallier Tayler
Recruiting in the Guildhall (1920) by Fred Roe
A British tank by Sir Muirhead Bone. a) what a great name b) what a brilliant boys' own adventure line drawing.
Three portraits of officers and three portraits of prisoners of war by Sir Matthew Smith
The corridor gallery
Matthew Smith (1879-1959) was born into a family of Yorkshire industrialists. Like a lot of rich men's sons he decided he wanted to be an artist and went to study with post-impressionist French painters in Pont Aven in 1908, then under Matisse in Paris. He served in the Great War, after which he suffered a nervous breakdown. The City of London Corporation was gifted a collection of some 1,000 of his paintings, watercolours, pastels, drawings and sketches in 1974.
The short corridor between the steps down from the lobby and the door into the undercroft displays some dozen of his works. Because they all have similar titles it's almost impossible to track them down online.
French landscape (1912)
French port Dieppe (1926)
Landscape at Villeneuve (1956)
Village landscape (1914)
Landscape (1956)
Unfinished landscape (1930s)
Cornish landscape (1920)
These works struggle to compete with the masterpieces in the main gallery. In Matthews' work, after the modern art revolution, the paint is laid on thick and draws attention to itself and to the canvas, to the surface and solidity, to the process of painting itself. They are about the interplay of oils, the composition of tones and colours in regard to each other, as juxtapositions of colours and shapes, of bands and shapes and lines and swirls. One result of this is that, having abandoned the realistic depiction of the outside world – using it now merely as inspiration for exercises in colour – there is an absence of the light effects which make so many of the Victorian paintings upstairs so powerful and feel so liberating.
Sir Matthew Smith Wikipedia article
Victorian painting is a game of two halves: as a general rule everything before about 1870 (except for the PRBs) was badly executed or village idiot kitsch; after the 1870s almost all the paintings have a new maturity of execution and subject matter. The change is comparable to the growth of the novel which, up to the 1860s was mostly a comic vehicle with only episodic attempts at seriousness; after around 1860 an increasingly mature, deep and moving medium for the exploration of human consciousness.
Seeing this many oil paintings together makes you realise the ability to oil to brilliantly capture the effect of sunlight – to dramatise a mythic subject and pose as in Clytemnestra – or to evoke a sense of shadow and light which is so characteristic of the English countryside, as in On a fine day – and then, in later Victorian experiments, to convey the hushed, muted shades of light at dawn and dusk – as in my favourite painting from the collection, Listed.
Oil painting can do this better than photography, in which it is very difficult to capture the difference between light and shade without glare or over-exposure. I hadn't quite appreciated the wonderful ability of oil painting to convey the impression of sunlight in all its different effects.
Guildhall Art Gallery website
About Guildhall Art Gallery
Every room in the British Museum
Every room in the National Gallery
Every room in Tate Britain (part one)
Every room in Tate Britain (part two)
Every room in Tate Modern
by Simon on February 6, 2016 • Permalink
Posted in Africa, Art, Exhibition, France, Great War, War
Tagged Aesthetic Movement, Albert Chevallier Tayler, Albert Goodwin, Alfred Edward Emslie, Alfred Emile Leopold Joseph Victor Stevens, art, Augustus Edwin Mulready, Balthasar Nebot, Ben Johnson, Brendan Neiland, Briton Riviere, Canaletto, Charles Henry Malcolm Kerr, Corporation of London, Daniel Pasmore, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Defeat of the floating batteries at Gibraltar 1782, Edward Armitage, Edwin Henry Landseer, Elizabeth Adela Stanhope Forbes, Every room in the Guildhall Art Gallery, Frank Holl, Frank William Brangwyn, Fred Roe, Frederick Daniel Hardy, Frederick Edwin Bodkin, Frederick Goodall, Frederick Leighton, Frederick Richard Pickersgill, gallery, Geoffrey Fletcher, George Adolphus Storey, George Dunlop Leslie, George Harcourt, George Percy Jacomb-Hood, Guildhall Art Gallery, Harold Workman, Henry Herbert La Thangue, Henry Scott Tuke, Henry Tamworth Wells, Hugh Goldwin Riviere, Industrial revolution, Jacqueline Stanley, James Baker Pyne, James Clarke Hook, James Tissot, Jan Griffier the Younger, Jean Jules Antoine de Noüy, John Atkinson Grimshaw, John Byam Liston Shaw, John Collier, John Everett Millais, John Gilbert, John Michael Wright, John Pearce, John Pettie, John Philip, John Rogers Herbert, John Singleton Copley, John Virtue, John Whitehead Walton, Jonathan Pratt, Ken Howard, La Ghirlandata, Luke Fildes, Marcus Stone, Marianne Stokes, Mark Boyle, Mark Titchner, Matthew Smith, Michele Tedesco, Muirhead Bone, Neils Moller Lund, Oliver Bevan, Paul Delaroche, Peter Blake, Pre-Raphaelites, Queen Victoria, Richard Paton, Roderick Jordan, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Thomas Faed, Victorian art, Victorian Painting, Walter Dendy Sadler, Walter Frederick Osborne, William Collins, William Geets, William Henry Gore, William Holman Hunt, William II Luker, William James Grant, William Logsdail, William Miller, William Shakespeare Burton
Posted by Simon on February 6, 2016
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/02/06/every-room-in-the-guildhall-art-gallery/
Tate Britain is dedicated to exhibiting British art from 1500 to the present day.
It is housed in a beautiful neo-classical building facing onto the river Thames. To the left a ramp and steps lead to the lower floor with a large exhibition space (currently showing Artist and Empire). To the right of the main building is the Clore Galleries (opened 1987), nine rooms on the ground floor housing the gallery's big collection of JMW Turner paintings, watercolours, sketches etc, along with a room of Constable and, upstairs, a room of pre-Raphaelite drawings/paintings, and a room of William Blake engravings and paintings.
If you enter up the grand steps through the main entrance you arrive at a long central hall, home to changing displays and currently housing Susan Philipsz' War Damaged Musical Instruments, an entirely audio display, tannoy speakers emitting the mournful sound of brass music played by instruments damaged in war, which she has rescued and refurbished. Sweet haunting sounds drift through the galleries as you saunter through the history of British art.
The west wing contains ten rooms covering British art from 1540 to 1910. Then you cross the entrance hall to the east wing and pick up the story in 1930, walk through another ten rooms containing the twentieth century exhibits.
Off to the side of these chronological sequences are single rooms dedicated to ad hoc displays of art ancient or bang up to date.
Full length portrait of Queen Elizabeth I by Steven van der Meulen. I like the still-medieval feel, the flatness, the compaction, and the gorgeousness of the detail, the tremendously patterned gold background to the left, but also the idealised plants, flowers and fruit to the right.
Sir Peter Lely Two Ladies of the Lake Family (c.1660) I love the stylised round-cheeked cherub look of all Lely's women. He was Dutch and emigrated here to become the principal portrait-painter at the court of Charles II, filling the position Sir Anthony van Dyck held for Charles I.
Samuel Richardson, the Novelist, Seated, Surrounded by his Second Family 1740–1 by Francis Hayman. This isn't a particularly good painting, I'm just surprised to learn of its existence. Richardson was a printer whose long epistolary novel about a 15-year-old serving girl named Pamela who writes letters to her parents about fighting off the 'attentions' of her country landowner master, Mr B, became the first bestseller and prompted a flood of merchandising and imitations. I enjoyed the attention paid to the silk of the dresses and the detail of the leaves on the trees.
William Hogarth The Painter and his Pug (1745) embodying a certain kind of pugnacious bully-boy philistinism. I've always enjoyed his O the Roast Beef of Old England ('The Gate of Calais') which is a pictorial list of reasons why the French are rubbish.
Hogarth's crudity is highlighted by comparison with Sir Joshua Reynolds's Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (1773). Here the focus not now on the depiction of static fabric, as in the Hayman painting of 30 years earlier, but on the effect of the overall composition, the diagonal made by the three women, and the softening effect of light and shade on the numerous decorative details, flowers, rug, plinth, jug and so on.
Sir William Beechey Portrait of Sir Francis Ford's Children Giving a Coin to a Beggar Boy (exhibited 1793) reflecting the later 18th century fashion for 'sentiment', for subjects depicting finer feelings.
Henry Fuseli Titania and Bottom (c.1790) stands out from the other 18th century works, mainly portraits in the country, for its dark fantasy, note the tiny old man with the long white beard at the end of a lady's leash in the bottom right.
Foreign painters in England
À propos Fuseli, it's worth pointing out how many of these 'British' painters are foreign. Not featured at all here is the great Hans Holbein (German Swiss painter to the court of Henry VIII), but other foreign painters 'incorporated' into the British tradition include van Dyck (Flemish), Rubens (Flemish), Lely (Dutch), Fuseli (Swiss), James Tissot (French), Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Netherlands), John Singer Sergeant (American), Percy Wyndham Lewis (Canadian).
I liked George Stubbs' Reapers (1785) rather than the several dramatic horse pictures on display because it is unusual and it shows a very human, almost Dutch landscape-type scene.
Next to Reynolds the other great genius of the 18th century is of course Thomas Gainsborough, represented here by half a dozen enormous portraits and a few landscapes. I liked Henry Bate-Dudley: it is not a magnificent picture, the opposite, it has a quiet, a calm superiority or confidence. Note Gainsborough's distinctively loose brushstrokes on coat, silver birch bark and among the leaves, but somehow coinciding with precise detail.
Looking back down the long 1780 room to compare them, you can see that Gainsborough is dainty and Reynolds is stately.
After five rooms I noticed a striking contrast with the National Gallery with its in-depth collection of European paintings from the same period – the lack of religious paintings. Overwhelmingly, the works here are portraits, with some landscapes. I counted only two religious paintings in these rooms:
Henry Thomson The Raising of Jairus' Daughter (exhibited 1820) with the stagey Poussinesque figures to the right but the rather haunting central figure of the dead daughter.
William Dyce's Madonna and Child (c.1827–30) a sport, a freak, a careful pastiche of a Raphael painting and completely unlike anything else being painted at the time.
Our British tradition of painting may be thin until the time of Reynolds (1770s) but I think it is typical of the national culture that it focuses on real people and places, and very often on touching and moving personal stories, rather than the tearful Maries and crucified Jesuses of the continental tradition.
All of that, the heavy earnestness of the Baroque tradition of languishing saints, weeping Madonnas and annunciating angels, is completely absent from these displays. For me the religion is in the attention to ordinary life, the valuing of people and their feelings, the same emphasis on psychology and the human scale which saw the English pioneer the novel, the art form which more than any other penetrates the human mind. This sensitivity and refinement of everyday human feeling is exemplified in:
George Romney Mrs Johnstone and her Son (?) (c.1775–80) Sure they're rich, sure it's partly to show off the sumptuousness of the fabric. But it also shows real love.
It's actually at the National Gallery, but Gainsborough's unfinished portrait of his young daughters, The Painter's Daughters with a Cat (1761) epitomises the English ability to capture love and affection, not Holy Love for a Martyred Saint, but real human love, and childishness and innocence and intimacy and aliveness.
Even when we do intense and visionary, rather than angels floating round the heads of saints, it is embodied in people and real landscapes:
Take Samuel Palmer's paintings strange, vivid, jewelled depictions of the landscape around Shoreham in Kent, eg The Gleaning Field (c.1833)
And striking because it is so unlike Constable and Turner and his other contemporaries is William Etty's Standing Female Nude (c.1835–40), very modern in its frankness, not trying to be Greek or statuesque.
There is so much Turner. Enough to fill eight good size rooms in the Clore Gallery off to the east of the main building, and this is only a small selection of what Tate owns. Turner's history paintings, Turner's classical landscapes, Turner's mountains, Turner's figures, Turner's watercolours. And in all states of finish, from vast formal commissions to sketches to unfinished canvases to the wispiest watercolours. Despite trying hard I find Turner difficult to really like, and the task is not helped by the sheer volume of material. There is a room here dedicated to 'Turner and the human figure' which proves conclusively how bad he was at it:
Two women with a letter (1830)
Reclining Venus (1828)
He went on the Grand Tour and I find the resulting huge Roman landscapes strained, pretentious, overblown, bad in a number of ways:
The Bay of Baiae, with Apollo and the Sibyl (exhibited 1823) I guess he's channeling Claude and umpteen other grand historical landscape painters, but for me the badness of the human figures in the foreground alerts you to other problems of composition and effect, most obviously the overblown scale.
But he also did very impressive history paintings, including quite a few celebrating The Battle of Trafalgar, as Seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory (1806–8)
Senses blunted by the vast Roman landscapes, I perked up when I saw the much more modest, and therefore impactful:
Death on a pale horse (1825-30) like something from the 1890s by Gustave Moreau.
Fishing upon the Blythe-Sand, Tide Setting In (exhibited 1809) simple and evocative. You're there.
Lake Llanberis and Dolbadarn Castle (1799–1800) Early and accurate.
All in all, I preferred the one room dedicated to Constable, which is hidden away in a corner of the Clore Gallery, to the eight preceding Turner rooms:
Fen Lane, East Bergholt (?1817) Like gently sloping farmland I've seen in my walks around Kent.
Glebe Farm (c.1830) the church nestling among trees, the solitary cow at the pond, the thoughtful little girl, all artfully composed to create a stock feeling, but a feeling I like.
Pre-Raphaelite Works on Paper
In the far corner of the Clore gallery is stairs up to the smallish room displaying pre-Raphaelite works on paper, lots of sketches but some oils as well. A wall label reminds me that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) only lasted from 1848 to 1853. I liked the strange, visionary, angular, amateurish but atmospheric work of early Rossetti, like Arthur's Tomb (1860). Technically not as innovatory as Constable or Turner, but these small works convey an experimental psychology, using medieval motifs for very modern reasons, to convey the troubled inter-personal relationships of the Brotherhood and their various muses, anticipating the tensions of, say, the Viennese Expressionists fifty years later.
But there are also examples of Rossetti in his smooth, glowing, bosomy phase: Monna Pomona (1864). I liked the wall label's description of the medievalising tendency in PRB work, its use of: 'shallow space, tight interlocking composition and rich colour of medieval manuscripts'. A handy description of what I like about medieval art.
I liked Ford Madox Brown's Jesus Washing Peter's Feet (1852–6) the oddities of composition riffing off medieval ideas of space to create a very modern psychology.
The glory years
Although the earlier rooms contain many good paintings, in my opinion British art explodes into a glory of masterpieces between the mid 1880s and the Great War, the period which saw Victorian academic art reach its height of verisimilitude before being swept away by the exhilarating eruption of the new Modernism. Rooms 1840, 1890 and 1900 contain painting after painting of pure visual pleasure, greatest hits which make everything before them pale by comparison.
James Tissot The Ball on Shipboard (c.1874) Illustration of a Trollope novel.
John Singer Sargent Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–6) Barely a century after Reynolds, and how far not only painting, but the understanding of mood and psychology, has expanded and deepened.
John William Waterhouse Saint Eulalia (exhibited 1885) Exotic realism.
William Logsdail St Martin-in-the-Fields (1888) The figures, hmm, but the depiction of the church itself is amazing, conveying the cold and drizzle…
John William Waterhouse The Lady of Shalott (1888) Late Victorian Arthurianism.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema A Silent Greeting (1889) A fantasy of the classical world.
Stanhope Alexander Forbes The Health of the Bride (1889) Illustration for a Tomas Hardy novel.
Anna Lea Merritt Love Locked Out (1890)
Sir George Clausen Brown Eyes (1891) Haunting the way strangers glimpsed in a crowd sometimes are.
Henry Scott Tuke August Blue (1893–4) Why is it always naked women? Why not some beautiful boys for a change?
Thomas Cooper Gotch Alleluia (exhibited 1896) Peculiar, odd, immaculate in some ways, but look at their lips.
John Singer Sargent Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer (1901) The figures are impressive but it's the vase that takes my breath away. Close up to the painting in the flesh you can see the casual mastery of oil with which it's done.
And then, suddenly, bang! It is the Modernists with their Futurism and Vorticism and Fauvism and fancy European ways:
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Red Stone Dancer (c.1913)
David Bomberg The Mud Bath (1914)
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson The Arrival (c.1913)
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson La Mitrailleuse (1915)
Wyndham Lewis Workshop (c.1914–5)
In the 1910 room are works for well after the Great War, like Eric Gill sculptures or Stanley Spencer or Alfred Wallis, but I'll leave them for part two.
One-off rooms
One room contains three big bright double portraits by David Hockney. Hockney's art has always seemed to me bright and empty, and also badly drawn, but I know I am in a minority.
Jo Spence Feminist artist-activist in the 1970s and 80s, member of the Hackney Flashers who spent a lot of time interrogating traditions, exploring issues, situating their practices. This seemed to involve quite a few photos of herself naked or topless, especially after being diagnosed with breast cancer. No doubt making serious feminist points, but also a treat for admirers of the larger woman.
Art and Alcohol Half a dozen historical paintings on the subject of the English and alcohol, one wall dominated by Cruickshank's famous panorama of a pissed society (at one stage place in a room by itself with lengthy commentary). The highlight is the series of b&w photos Gilbert and George took in the 1970s of them and others getting pissed in a pub in the East End, the photos treated with various effects, blurring and distortion conveying a sense of the evening degenerating.
Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928–1985) Never heard of him, a leading artist, novelist, playwright and poet born in north-west India, which then became Pakistan, where he made a reputation before moving to England in 1962 – presumably he's represented here because Tate bought his works thereafter. The wall label explained that he used Islamic texts as the basis for his abstract-looking paintings, but I was caught by some of the images which reminded me powerfully of Paul Klee, one of my heroes.
Chessmen One (1961)
Blue Blue Jazz
Meem II (1967)
Tate Britain
Tate Britain floorplan
Posted in Art
Tagged Anna Lea Merritt, Anthony van Dyck, Anwar Jalal Shemza, art, British art, Constable, CRW Nevinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, David Bomberg, David Hockney, Elizabeth I, Ford Madox Brown, Francis Hayman, Gilbert and George, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry Fuseli, Henry Scott Tuke, James Tissot, JMW Turner, Jo Spence, John Constable, John Singer Sergeant, John William Waterhouse, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Joshua Reynolds, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir George Clausen, Sir Peter Lely, Sir William Beechey, Stanhope Alexander Forbes, Tate Britain, Thomas Cooper Gotch, Turner, William Hogarth, William Logsdail
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/every-room-in-tate-britain-part-one/


To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide a 100 percent deduction for the health insurance costs of individuals.
This Act may be cited as the "Helping Make Health Insurance Affordable for Individuals and Small Businesses Act of 2009".
SEC. 2. Deduction for qualified health insurance costs of individuals.
"SEC. 224. Costs of qualified health insurance.
"(a) In general.—In the case of an individual, there shall be allowed as a deduction an amount equal to the amount paid during the taxable year for coverage for the taxpayer, his spouse, and dependents under qualified health insurance.
"(b) Qualified health insurance.—For purposes of this section, the term 'qualified health insurance' means insurance which constitutes medical care; except that such term shall not include any insurance if substantially all of its coverage is of excepted benefits described in section 9832(c).
"(1) COORDINATION WITH MEDICAL DEDUCTION, ETC.—Any amount paid by a taxpayer for insurance to which subsection (a) applies shall not be taken into account in computing the amount allowable to the taxpayer as a deduction under section 162(l) or 213(a). Any amount taken into account in determining the credit allowed under section 35 shall not be taken into account for purposes of this section.
"(2) DEDUCTION NOT ALLOWED FOR SELF-EMPLOYMENT TAX PURPOSES.—The deduction allowable by reason of this section shall not be taken into account in determining an individual's net earnings from self-employment (within the meaning of section 1402(a)) for purposes of chapter 2.".
"(22) COSTS OF QUALIFIED HEALTH INSURANCE.—The deduction allowed by section 224.".
"Sec. 224. Costs of qualified health insurance.".


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X Factor winner Sam Bailey has claimed this year's Official Christmas Number One in the Official UK Singles Chart.
Her cover of Demi Lovato's 'Skyscraper' has knocked Lily Allen's version of Keane's 'Somewhere Only We Know' off the top spot and held off competition from Pharrell's 'Happy', which charted at Number Two this week, reports the Official Charts Company. Bailey outsold the Neptunes man's effort by more than two copies to one, making it one of the fastest selling singles of the year, selling 149,000 in total.
Leona Lewis stays at Number Three with her Christmas single 'One More Sleep', whilst this week's Number Four, AC/DC, have claimed their first ever UK Top Ten single after a Facebook campaign tried to get their classic track 'Highway To Hell' to Number One. Avicii complete the Top Five with 'Hey Brother'.
In the Official UK Albums Chart, Robbie Williams has stayed at Number One with his swing album 'Swings Both Ways' to take the Official Christmas Number One Album, mirroring his achievement with his previous swing record, 'Swing When You're Winning', in 2001. Embroiled in a close battle with One Direction's 'Midnight Memories' and former Take That bandmate Gary Barlow's 'Since I Saw You Last' for much of the week, Williams edged into poll position, beating the 2010 X Factor contestants by a mere 200 copies. Barlow finished at Number Three.
All three albums have sold 116,000 copies over the last seven days, with 'Swings Both Ways' and 'Midnight Memories' each having sold over 126,000 sales each since their release. One Direction could now overtake Emeli Sandé's 'Our Version Of Events' as 2013's overall biggest selling album of the year if their sales continue between now and the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Olly Murs' 'Right Place Right Time' remains at Number Four this week, whilst Beyoncé's surprise self-titled album stays at Number Five.


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