Dresden Portrait Re-Identified as a ‘Lost’ portrait of Augusta Großherzogin von Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1822-1916) by F.X. Winterhalter

Dresden Portrait Re-Identified as Winterhalter’s ‘Lost’ portrait of Augusta Großherzogin von Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1822-1916)

The recent catalogue of Victorian Miniatures in the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has helped me to shed light on the portrait in the collection of Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, known hitherto only as Damenbildnis [see no 321, Works by Franz Xaver Winterhalter 1846-1850]. 

The painting can now be fully identified as a portrait of Augusta Großherzogin von Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1822-1916), née Princess of Cambridge, painted at Windsor Castle between 7 and 16 October 1846.

 

The following research information backs up my suggestion:

• A miniature enamel copy of this portrait (5.0 x 4.0 cm) by John Simpson (1811-aft 1871), signed, dated, and identified as a copy after Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s portrait of Princess Augusta of Cambridge, Hereditary Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, of 1846, is in the collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II (RCIN 421918).
• A further copy of this portrait by Henry Melville (fl 1846-86) (oil on canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm, oval), is also in the collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II (RCIN 406676).
• Both copies were commissioned by Queen Victoria after the original portrait by F.X. Winterhalter, which was given to the sitter’s husband, Friedrich Wilhelm Großherzog von Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1819-1904).

There are numerous references to confirm the dating of the portrait from October 1846:

• The portrait was commissioned by Queen Victoria from Franz Xaver Winterhalter, who was in England from September 1846 to February 1847 [Oliver Millar, Victorian Pictures, 1: 284]
• One of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, Hon. Eleanor Stanley, wrote in a letter from Windsor Castle, dated 7 October 1846: “I was on the whole day with some Royalty or other, as the Grand Duchess [of Mecklenburg] sat for her picture from eleven till two to Winterhalter, and desired [me] to go and sit with her… After lunch she had another sitting, and I attended again till four o’clock, when she went out driving with the Queen…” [Eleanor Stanley, Letters (London: 1916), 136].
• The portrait is mentioned in Queen Victoria’s diary in an entry for 16 October 1846, where the portrait is described as ‘quite beautiful & so boldly, as well as finely painted’ [Oliver Millar, Victorian Pictures (London: 1992), 1: 326].
• It was given as a joint present from Queen Victoria and the Dowager Queen Adelaide to the sitter’s husband, then the Hereditary Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, on 17 October 1846 [ibid].
• The portrait is mentioned on the list of portraits by F.X. Winterhalter, published posthumously by the artist’s nephew, Franz Wild, in 1894, where it appears among other 1846 portraits by the artist [Franz Wild, Neckrologe…, 38].

A confirmation has been recently received from the Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, accepting this identification.

© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, 2012

Portraits @ Leonard Joel May 2011 Sunday Art Auction

Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Portraits @ Leonard Joel May 2011 Sunday Art Auction

As always, a quick overview of portraits that were offered at recent art sales. Because of the all-inclusive nature of Leonard Joel’s auctions (as discussed in the previous post), their sales are perhaps the best places to view and find a wide variety of portraits by local and international artists offered on the Australian art market.

While the cross-section of portraits was more exciting in some of their previous offers, the May 2011 Sunday Art Auction also unearthed some interesting, unusual and unexpected items, perhaps none more so than Ernst Buckmaster’s self-portrait from 1926, painted when the artist was in his late 20s. Buckmaster shows himself in a flattering three-quarter turn against an abstracted background; his face boldly lit from the left-hand side, emphasising the shock of bushy black hair, deep-set eyes, prominent nose and chin, and a slightly haughty expression about his mouth and brow. There is something indelibly Edwardian about this self-representation, clearly emulating the bravura style of John Singer Sargent. One has to love the artifice of the portrait, where the artist chose to represent himself standing in a simple painter’s smock, which covers a formal black-tie dress complete with a bowtie and starched collar, as if the artist presages the popular success he would achieve later in life as a fashionable landscape and still-life painter. Estimated at $2,000-$4,000, the portrait sold for $6,600 (IBP).

It is interesting to compare this work to a portrait of the same sitter by Jean Sutherland, obviously painted much later, but displaying the same slightly arrogant and self-assured arching of the brow (sold here en suite with Sutherland’s self-portrait, est. $800-$1,200); or indeed against another self-portrait in the auction, that of Douglas Watson of 1945, who also dashingly portrayed himself with a cigarette in his hand and sporting Hollywood mustachios (est $1,000-$1,500; unsold).

Perhaps my favourite portrait in the auction has to be a charming and lively study by Rupert Bunny of his wife and muse, Jeanne Morel. Painted c. 1895, the portrait predates some of Bunny’s better known, lavish full-length representations of his wife, many of which appeared at the last year’s retrospective of the artist (and discussed within these pages in a number of earlier posts). The portrait depicts Jeanne boldly in clear and sharp profile, lost in an intent conversation with an invisible interlocutor. The liveliness and immediacy of the image has something of an amazing snap-shot quality to it one would normally associate with a photograph rather than a drawing. Her face is executed in beautiful detail, while her dress is but a hint, a suggestion of folds and outlines of puffed sleeves and a late-Victorian bodice. There are echoes of Sargent’s celebrated portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, painted a few years previously in 1892-93, especially in the way Jeanne Morel holds on to the side of the chair with her hand. It is undoubtedly one of the loveliest and surprisingly fresh watercolour portraits I’ve seen by the artist in a long time, and the public must have thought as highly of it as I did: estimated at $3,000-$4,000, the portrait drawing sold for $13,200 IBP, more than four times its lower estimate.

Other portraits on offer included Tony Tuckson’s Matisse-esque interpretation of his wife, Margaret, from the early to mid 1950s (est. $16,000-$20,000, sold $28,800 IBP); David Rankin’s ghostly evocation of his wife, writer Lily Brett, of 1986 (est $1,000-$2,000, sold $2,400 IBP); a rather dashing representation of Violet Teague’s husband (?), Roger Teague, in full riding habit (est $3,000-$5,000, unsold); and a fresh and vibrantly painted portrait of an unknown lady by Archibald Douglas Colquhoun (est. $700-$900, unsold).

Norman Lindsay’s oil Rita of c. 1940s made yet another appearance on the auction block (est. $20,000-$30,000; sold $24,000 IBP); and there was also a lively profile portrait drawing of the same model (est. $1,000-$2,000, sold $3,360 IBP). And since we’re admitting identifiable models into the sphere of portraiture, we can’t go past Peter Churcher’s generously proportioned male nude, Simon Seated, which is unfortunately not the most felicitous creation by this otherwise talented artist (est. $7,000-$9,000, unsold).

As always, there was also a selection of what one of the former auctioneers of this house inspiringly termed ‘instant ancestors’ – portraits of unknown, soberly dressed ladies and gentlemen gazing at the viewer from the 18^th and 19^th Century canvasses, such as an unknown gentleman by an early 19^th-C. British school (est. $1,000-$2,000, unsold); or a copy after George Romney’s portrait of John Askew of Whitehaven, c. 1800 (est. $2,000-$3,000, unsold). Perhaps the most attractive and romantic of the lot is an 18^th-C. Portrait of a Lady by the Swiss François Ferriere, dating from 1786, in full powdered wig and beautifully executed gauze wrap around her shoulders; the lightness of the face, hair, and bodice effectively silhouetted against the overall darkness of the background (est $800-$1,200; sold $1,140 IBP).

This selection shows that portraiture, both as a genre and an area of collecting, continues to fare alive and well in Australia; and it is thanks to the auctions like these that we see gems, rarities, and surprises like those by Bunny, Buckmaster, or Ferriere emerging from the confines of private Australian collections to find new homes, sometimes with surprising (and profitable!) results for their former owners.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

Sunday Art Auction @ Leonard Joel May 2011

Tuesday, 10 May 2011 

Sunday Art Auction @ Leonard Joel, May 2011 

The Sunday Art Auction at Leonard Joel, that took place in Melbourne last weekend, looked almost more exciting by comparison to its competitors, Menzies Art Brands and Deutscher-Hackett. The auction houses that operate at the top of the art market, including Menzies, Deutscher, and Sotheby’s, limit themselves  by necessity to a selected pool of artists, prescribed by their price bracket and art market reputation. As such, they are at mercy of the availability of artworks by this select group of artists, and frequently their auction collections appear lacklustre simply because they were not able to find and secure first-rate works by top-selling secondary-market artists at that point in time.

Leonard Joel does not have – or can’t afford – such conniptions. Their only rule for monthly Sunday Art Auctions is that the reserve price of the offered work should not fall below a particular price bracket (otherwise, it is immediately consigned to their weekly sessions). Ironically, this all-inclusiveness offers the viewer a by far more exciting, varied, and heterogeneous selection of artworks, catering to the widest possible selection of tastes and aesthetic predilections.

Among the best things to be seen at Leonard Joel on Sunday were works by 18^th and 19^th Century European masters. A number of their works – either genre scenes or landscapes – would give many an Australian contemporary artist a run for their money in terms of quality of composition, narrative, and technical brilliancy of execution. I have confessed repeatedly to being a nineteenth-century aficionado, and my gaze was immediately drawn upon the entry to the exhibition space to a medium size work by an unknown painter of an Albanian woman with Child, of c. 1875, a favourite staple in the repertoire of 19^th-Century European artists. Though the condition of this painting was not the best, one could still perfectly admire the confident execution, the drawing of the figure, and the exquisite brushwork of the embroideries and the lace (est. $800-1,200).

I was also drawn to a large-scale and magnificently executed autumnal landscape scene with a solitary figure of a returning hunter by a Danish artist, Sigvard Hansen. Such quality of art, such atmospheric clarity, such dexterity with bright, fresh colouring arguably has not been seen in Australian landscape painting. The mimetic quality of the picture is such that one can literally sense the autumnal chill of a foggy Scandinavian afternoon (est. $3,000-$5,000).

Another superb European work is a little military painting, possibly by a French mid-nineteenth century artist, perhaps of an episode from the Crimean War (est. $2,000-$4,000). In spite of its sketchy and effervescent quality, the work already displays a strong grasp of the composition, an assured delineation between the foreground, middle ground and the background, and such excellent freshness of colours that one could easily dwell on every brushstroke and every pigment application for hours on end.

The auctions at Leonard Joel are also the best place to view 19^th and early 20^th Century Australian art. Hopefully, just like myself, visitors to the auction preview were able to disentangle themselves from the favourite art market preoccupation with names and frames (in the words of the late Joseph Brown), and enjoy the colour, composition, and technical quality of many of these works. The auction offered a wide variety of genre scenes, landscapes, and still lives, the comparable but much lesser quality versions of which can be seen in numerous commercial galleries around Melbourne by the present-day limners. Take for example, the superbly sparkling Rubery Bennett landscape (est $1,000-$1,500); or the delicately-hued flower arrangement by Alan D. Baker ($6,000-$8,000); or fresh sunlit landscape sketch by HS Power (est. $1,000-$1,500); not to mention the delicately tinted twilight scene by that master of Art Nouveau, John Longstaff ($6,000-$8,000).

The auction certainly had plenty of modern and contemporary stable to suit everyone’s taste, and, sure enough, the sprinkling of works by such auction room favourites as Norman Lindsay, Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, Sydney Nolan, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, and many others proliferated. These were supplemented by refreshing appearance of works by such contemporary artists as Bruce Armstrong, John Kelly, Rick Amor, Dale Frank, David Aspden, Wendy Stavrianos, Mark Howson, and even a large-scale Jim Thalassoudis (est. $3,000-$5,000).

As always, perhaps the biggest attraction of these smaller auction houses is indeed the fact that you just never know what surprise might await you around the corner or on the opposite side of the partition, from the superbly stylised creations by Dorothy Braund (est $3,000-$5,000), to the most whimsical and humorously observational engravings by Lionel Lindsay, such as The Demon, showing two most adorable kittens spooked by the barrel-chested, strutting magpie (est. $1,000-$2,000).

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

[It all started with a] Portrait of Princess Tatiana Yusupova

Wednesday, 2 March 2011

[It all started with a] Portrait of Princess Tatiana Yusupova…

The previous entry made think how did my “love affair” with Winterhalter began (“love affair” being an apt description, as several exes referred to Winterhalter as “the other man in my life”…).

In the late 1985, I was thumbing through my uncle’s collection of postcards with reproductions of paintings from the Hermitage Collection. From the multitude of images that flicked before my eyes, I was inexplicably drawn to a single picture. The inscription on the reverse laconically stated that this was a portrait of Princess Tatiana Alexandrovna Yusupova, painted in Paris in 1858 by an artist called Franz Xaver Winterhalter.

I was intrigued. I wanted to find out more. I wanted to see the portrait in the flesh. Being only fourteen years of age, I was not at liberty to jump on a train and make a lengthy journey to Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then called) for the purpose of seeing a single portrait. However, an opportunity presented itself in 1986, when a school excursion was organised to Leningrad, with the State Hermitage being a compulsory stop on its itinerary.

After a short introductory tour of this most magnificent collection, that lasted all of about forty five minutes, we were let loose around the museum. Clutching a crumpled piece of paper with the map of the Hermitage, I ran towards the French nineteenth-century section that was located on the third floor in one of the distant parts of the building. I passed the rooms studded with Rembrandts and Titians; I did not give a second glance to the priceless Leonardo da Vinci or the most ravishing Rubens. Through the convoluted system of rooms and staircases, I finally reached my destination. I did not stop to admire the David or Ingres; slid straight past a magnificent portrait of Empress Josephine by Gérard, until I was finally there, standing in front of the portrait of Princess Yusupova by Winterhalter.

The portrait exceeded all my expectations. Floating majestically on a cloud of lace and tulle, Princess Yusupova casts down her regal glance at the viewer from a sizeable canvas measuring approximately 150 by 100 centimetres. Her wavy dark-auburn hair is parted in the middle and arranged in a luxurious heavy chignon. Two massive pearl earrings drop from her ears; a magnificent necklace with gargantuan pearls adorns her smooth polished neck and shoulders. Her arms are weighed down by massive golden bangles and drown in the voluminous crinoline skirt, which is ready to burst forth from the confines of the picture. A heavy dark-crimson velvet curtain billows behind the Princess revealing an imposing marble column with a view to a park beyond.

When I finally shook myself out of a trance-like state and tore myself away from the portrait, I looked around the rest of the room. To my astonishment, apart from the portrait of Princess Yusupova, there were more portraits by Winterhalter [as I would later discover, altogether the State Hermitage has sixteen paintings by the artist]. More grand titles were to be found on the wall labels – empresses, grand duchesses, countesses; more aristocratic names were to be read to stir up my curiosity – the Romanovs, Shouvalovs, Naryshkins, Mousin-Pushkins.

I wanted to find out more about the artist who created these magnificent portraits; and about the fascinating sitters, whom he recorded for posterity, who were staring from canvasses at the viewer through the veil of the ages. Thus began my journey into the life and art of Franz Xaver Winterhalter, which has continued (on and off) to the present day.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

The Naked Face II

Saturday, 15 January 2011

The Naked Face: Exhibition of Self-Portraits at the NGV [Part II]

[... continued from Part I ...]

 

Sadly, what looks good on the pages of a book, does not necessarily translate well into the exhibition design. Grouping and positioning of the works on the gallery’s walls frequently appears to be incongruous and haphazard. For example, there is a seemingly coherent section devoted to self-portraits of artists representing themselves within a studio environment, and yet one finds another body of works on exactly the same subject placed inexplicably elsewhere in the exhibition space.

 

While  self-portrait etchings by Rembrandt and Mike Parr look marvellous side by side on the pages of the catalogue, the same placement does not work within the exhibition space, where Parr’s bold large-scale works overpower Rembrandt’s delicate etchings, which would have been more advantageously displayed next two those of Van Dyck and artists of his era. How much more powerful Chuck Close’s self-portrait would have looked placed beside an equally hyper-realistic, over-life-size self-portrait by Vernon Ah Kee! Other examples can be also cited.

The possibilities of representation and self-representation have undergone considerable changes over the course of the 20^th and 21^st Century, challenging mimetic limitations of the genre. This aspect of (self-)portraiture is explored well within the catalogue with a focus on works by such artists as John Nixon, Mathew Jones, Antony Gormley, Destiny Deacon, Katherine Hattam, Huang Yan, Gareth Sansom, David McDiarmid, and others. However, once again, works by these artists are scattered all over the exhibition space. The impact of this radical shift against purely mimetic representation is diluted and lost.

The inclusion of dresses by Coco Chanel and Zandra Rhodes as “self-portraits” is questionable. It is once again a very interesting supposition that stands up academically within the pages of the book, but looks isolated and out of place within the context of this exhibition. On what authority does the curator decide that these two dresses represent their respective designers better than any other thousands of garments they produced? If we accept these dresses as self-portraits, what was the reason for the exclusion of garments by other designers? Last but not least, their placement against a sickly pink background with works by Warhol and McDiarmid creates such a stereotypically “gay” corner, as to be almost insulting.

Some of the works in the exhibition are not self-portraits at all. The interpretation of works by Claude Mellan, Claude Lorraine, Francisco de Goya, Balthus, Vivienne Shark Le Witt, and Andrew Pyett as self-portraits is tenuous in the extreme, and would have been best relegated to the pages of the catalogue as purely illustrative material. Explaining the notion of “narcissism” in a gallery space lined with mirrors; hanging Julie Rrap’s work “Flying” high up near the ceiling; and creating a “gay” corner smacks of “dumbing down” of the exhibition display.

Any survey of self-portraiture, be it a book or an exhibition, is set by default to be dominated by portraits of white middle-aged men. Gaston attempted to re-address this gendered imbalance by including perhaps every self-portrait by a female artist to be found in the gallery’s collection, including those by Patricia Piccinini, Kate Benyon, Sue Ford, Bea Maddocks, Katherine Hattam, Sybil Craig, Nancy Borlaise, Julie Rrap, Destiny Deacon, Cindy Sherman and others. However, without editing down the inevitable bulk of male portraits, the exhibition space is still overwhelmed by pasty-skinned middle-aged men staring down at the viewer.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that the premise of The Naked Face exhibition as an academic and educational exercise that focuses on different aspects and nuances of self-portraiture is intelligent, erudite, and inspired. The accompanying exhibition catalogue is a statement to the curator’s passion and knowledge on the subject. However, given the challenge of drawing the exhibition entirely from the National Gallery of Victoria, which is not a specialist self-portrait collection, perhaps required a differentiation of approach between the book and the exhibition display. It is my opinion that, given the limitations of the collection’s holdings, the display would have benefited from a chronological hang where the Old Masters would have represented an infinitely stronger body of work, and where the impact of the radical shift against the purely mimetic representation in the 20^th and 21^st century would have looked more dramatic by comparison. A tighter editing of the works on view would have likewise addressed the inevitable gendered imbalance of a self-portrait show.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgement.]

The Naked Face I

Friday, 14 January 2011

The Naked Face: Exhibition of Self-Portraits at the NGV [Part I]

The Naked Face surveys the development of self-portraiture and its major concepts over the last four hundred years. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the NGV’s collection, and it is perhaps one the very few exhibitions to bring together works by Australian and International artists within the same space. The passion of the exhibition’s curator, Dr Vivien Gaston, for the subject of portraiture is evident, as she left no stone unturned in her search for self-portraits across the gallery’s various departments.

As the result, it includes paintings, works on paper, prints, photographs, fashions, textiles, video and installation works by such artists as Rembrandt, Anthony van Dyck, Fred McCubbin, Rupert Bunny, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Francesco Clemente, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, John Brack, Albert Tucker, William Dargie, Peter Booth, Rick Amor, Juan Davila, Tim Storrier, Destiny Deacon, Antony Gormley, John Nixon, Lewis Miller, Patricia Piccinini, Vernon Ah Kee, and numerous others. The number of works on view easily exceeds a hundred; the exhibition spans across four major gallery spaces on the NGV’s upper floors at the Federation Square.

The exhibition contains a number of the most popular and beloved works within the NGV’s collection, such as self-portraits by Joseph Highmore, Joseph Wright of Derby, George Lambert, Hugh Ramsey, Andy Warhol; Johann Zoffany’s homo-eroticised self-portrait of himself as David with the head of Goliath; Jacopo Amigoni’s striking portrait group which includes the famous opera castrati Farinelli; and Peter Booth’s Painting of 1977, portraying the artist against a post-apocalyptic background. The Naked Face provides an opportunity to see and consider these works within a new context.

It also includes a number of remarkable works, which are seldom on display, such as Napier Waller’s excellent self-portrait in front of his State Library mural; Farrell and Parkin’s La Piedad, a double-self-portrait in the guise of Virgin Mary mourning the Christ; a powerful set of Mike Parr’s self-portrait etchings; or Julie Rrap’s digital video work showing the artist melting in her own reflection. It is surprising that sculpture is all but absent from the exhibition space, but this is perhaps the limitation of the collection rather than a curatorial oversight.

Gaston approached the exhibition as an academic, intellectual, and educational exercise. It is accompanied by a catalogue with an excellently researched essay, showing the depth of her knowledge on the subject. The body of the catalogue is divided into several thematic chapters, each of which pursues and explains in depth various aspects and nuances of self-portraiture, and provides a very informative and erudite read.

The text flows clearly and coherently; juxtapositions of works within the pages of the catalogue appear innovative and challenging. However, when the attempt is made to translate the contents of the book into an exhibition display, chapter by chapter and page by page, the whole concept becomes somewhat unstuck. Unlike, for example, the famous gallery of self-portraits at the Uffizi in Florence, or various specialist portrait galleries around the world, the National Gallery of Victoria is not a collection of that is focused on this particular genre. The limitations of the NGV’s holdings of self-portraits simply do not keep up with the academic premise of Gaston’s curatorial thesis, and it appears that she has done the best she could with the available exhibition material on hand.

[... to be continued ...]

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgement.]

NGV Old European Masters: Jacob Jordaens

Sunday, 9 January 2011

NGV Old European Masters: Jacob Jordaens

Another little gem of the National Gallery’s collection is Mercury and Argus by Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678). Jordaens was an interesting artist inasmuch as his skills in rendering birds and animals was so highly regarded, that Peter Paul Rubens, the most outstanding artist of the Flemish Baroque period, employed Jordaens in his studio to paint the creatures within the backgrounds of his own works. Jordaens’s picture in the NGV’s collection bears witness to his superior skills in this metier.

The painting is inspired by a legend from Greco-Roman mythology, according to which Jupiter, the principal Olympian deity, fell in love with a nymph Io. In order to hide his amorous dalliances from his jealous wife, Juno, Jupiter turned Io into a white heifer (presumably turning Io back into a woman when making love to her…). Nevertheless, Juno got the wind of her husband’s latest infidelity, and sent her servant Argus to keep a watchful eye on Io the cow. Argus had 100 eyes all over his body, and thus the creature never slept, always keeping a watchful eye, preventing Jupiter’s further trysts with Io (the reader might recall that a number of British and Australian newspapers were also called Argus in an allusion to this watchful, ever-seeing creature!).

Jordaens illustrated the next moment of the narrative, where Jupiter sent the messenger god Mercury to lull Argus to sleep with a sonorous melody from his flute (which we see resting in the left foreground of the picture). Mercury is reaching out for his sword and is about to slay the sleeping Argus and set Io free. The artist simplified the painting and eschewed depicting Argus’s one hundred sleeping eyes. Instead, he concentrated on juxtaposing the muscular suppleness of Mercury’s body against the tanned sagging skin of the ageing Argus.

The rest of the story went as follows: Juno mourned the slain Argus, and placed his one  hundred eyes on tail feathers of the peacock, which thence became her sacred bird. She also sent a gadfly to mercilessly bite the liberated Io, chasing her out to Africa. The name of the place where she crossed from one continent to another is called Bosporus (in modern-day Turkey), which some etymologists claim to mean an ox passage.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

NGV Old Masters: François Boucher

Saturday, 8 January 2011

NGV Old Masters: François Boucher

Among the undisputed gems of the National Gallery’s collections are two small oval paintings by François Boucher (1703-1770). Together with Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) and Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), he was among the three artists who encapsulated the essence of the French Rococo.

Boucher’s paintings capture the playful and youthful spirit of the French Court, which was so vividly brought to life in the writings of Nancy Mitford. The artist was very popular at the court of Versailles, and the Sun King’s mistress, Marquise de Pompadour, was among his most prolific patrons. Paintings depicting eroticised pastoral scenes were en vogue among the French aristocracy. The choice of peasants – and most frequently shepherds and shepherdesses – was dictated by the utopian take on their lives by a number of contemporary philosophers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as numerous writers and playwrights.

In both paintings lovers’ trysts take place within a shaded wooded setting, a natural place for a secret rendez-vous. In the first painting, The Mysterious Basket (1748), a young man lays a basket of flowers with a hidden love note next to a sleeping girl. Everything within the painting points towards an innocent courtship and budding love. The sleeping girl denotes dormant sexuality; a baby cupid, appearing on the marble relief in the background, also points to the sexual innocence of the couple. Though our young lover firmly grips the phallic log with his left hand, clearly stating his intentions towards the girl, his sexuality is not threatening. The little dog at the girl’s feet, which usually stands for male sexual prowess, is only just waking up, raising its head towards the girl. The basket of flowers, a trope for female genitalia, is likewise full, denoting that the girl’s virginity is still intact.

In the second painting, The Enjoyable Lesson (1748), where a young man is teaching shepherdess how to play a flute, the love affair has progressed much further. Not only the couple is in a much closer physical proximity of each other, the marble lion with its raised head in the background, and the foreground goat staring directly at the viewer both indicate matured sexuality and ardent desire. The young man puts a flute into the shepherdess’s mouth, while she firmly grips the rod that descends from his loins. The erotic connotations of this scene are obvious, and are further affirmed by the woven basket on the right hand side of the picture that is about to tip over and spill the precious flowers contained within.

Most highly regarded artists, such as Boucher, eschewed the depiction of openly pornographic scenes, substituting them for a highly inventive iconographic language. Both paintings contain erotic symbols and allusions that would have been clearly understood and read by the spectators of the era. Each subsequent encounter with the paintings would have uncovered a previously overlooked nuance or connotation, and unfailingly brought another knowing smile to the faces of its audience.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

NGV Old Master Portraits: Sir John Everett Millais

Friday, 7 January 2011

NGV Old Master Portraits: Sir John Everett Millais

Created in the twilight years of his career, late portraits of Sir John Everett Millais speak of painterly wisdom and artistic maturity. The present portrait of Cecil Prout Webb, of 1887, painted within the last decade of the artist’s life, is an exercise in technical skill and stylistic perfection. The boy is portrayed full-length out of doors, seated on a moss-covered garden seat, dressed in a smart winter coat edged with fur, and sporting a pair of new shiny boots and leather gloves. Children occupy a significant place in the artist’s oeuvre, and he often used his own children and those of his neighbours and friends as prototypes for some of the most successful genre pictures, like My First Sermon (1863), Cherry Ripe (1879) and Soap Bubbles (1886).

Traditional iconography of the portrait would have been clearly read by a 19th-century spectator. Young Master Webb is no ordinary boy, but an heir to what Nancy Mitford termed in her novels “all this”. His carefully tailored coat with its rich trimmings sits comfortably on the boy, and his leather shoes are of the proper black colour as becoming of a young gentleman. Furthermore, the woodland setting and a moss-covered stone seat speak of establishment, stability, and continuity, while the overgrown garden scape evokes a traditional country manor.

However, there is a sad twist to this story. Recent research, based on the date of the portrait and the dates of the sitter’s life, indicates that this is a posthumous portrait of the boy. As such, it would have been commissioned by the boy’s parents from Millais (a highly successful as well as fashionable portrait painter of the era, with charges of up to £2,000 for a full length likeness) on the basis of photographs.

True to the prevalent Victorian painterly tradition where ‘every picture tells a story’, Millais incorporated this sad narrative into the portrait. The rays that light the boy’s face belong to a sun of spring, traditionally identified in painting with youth, while a shiver of winter that permeates the twilight atmosphere allegorises old age.  Similarly, while traditionally children were represented dressed in light summer’s day clothes, the sombre winter attire of the young Master Webb may also point to his untimely passing.

Millais’s portraits of children are usually filled with energy and effervescence, and more often than not are highly original compositions based on sketches and drawings from life. However, faced with a challenge of creating an original work of art based on a photographic still, Millais may have sought inspiration from such earlier portrait painters like Franz Xaver Winterhalter, whose portrait of the young Duc de Brabant of 1844 it strongly resembles. It is highly probable that Millais found a successful resolution to this challenge by basing the present portrait on an existing iconographic template.

Landscape and portraiture – two of the most popular genres in English painting – are brought together successfully in this canvas by Millais, an accomplished master of both. The painting thus leaves the confines of portraiture and evolves into Millais’ aesthetic reflection on youth and the transcendent essence of life.

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]

NGV Old Master Portraits: Sir William Beechey

Thursday, 6 January 2011

NGV Old Master Portraits: Sir William Beechey

It was with a great degree of excitement that I’d learnt about the National Gallery’s forthcoming acquisition of portraits by Sir William Beechey (1753-1839). I became fascinated with the artist ever since “discovering” him in the process of my M.A. thesis research on British portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.

Beechey was among the most prominent portrait painters of the late Georgian period. He enjoyed an extensive patronage of George III and his family; and to this day a large number of his portraits have been preserved in the collection of the British Royal Family. However, with his death at the dawn of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1839, his star began to wane, and as the result he is virtually forgotten today.

However, the portraits at the National Gallery of Victoria (which by now probably has the biggest holding of his works after Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II) show why Beechey’s works at the time were judged to rival those of his near-contemporary, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1753-1839), as they were considered to be more truthful and more naturalistic than the romanticised creations of the latter.

Under a greatest secrecy I was taken to the restoration rooms of the National Gallery for a sneak preview of the “new portraits” of the Earl and Countess of Stradbroke, as well as a portrait of a lady, which was in the gallery’s collection for a number of years. Before my eyes they were cleaned off the centuries of accumulated dirt and grime, and the yellowish varnish, which mars so many of the Old Master paintings, was gradually removed to reveal Beechey’s dazzling whites, seductive pinks, and a beautiful flowing brushwork and paint application which adds to a sensation of weightlessness of his female sitters’ diaphanous gowns.

The echoes of French Rococo are present in these paintings in the way fabrics and folds, hair and jewellery, flower garlands and surrounding foliage swirl around the sitter creating the feeling of a spiral movement throughout the picture. However, the portraits are also imbued with the unmistakeable air of early Romanticism.

In both portraits, women are placed in an outdoor setting, which in the annals of aristocratic portraiture not only implies their physical connection to the surrounding landscape in terms of the literal ownership of the land on which they stand, but also a psychological connection to nature, thus evoking a notion of sensibility, which was of great importance in art, literature, and overall cultural landscape of Georgian England (poignantly encapsulated in the novels of Jane Austin).

The newly refurbished Regency Room places these portraits within the context of the art and taste of their era, though sadly the National Gallery lacks a really strong representation of Lawrence in their collection to enable comparison between these two formidable portrait specialists who frequently found themselves at odds and in competition with each other, supported as they were by different factions at court, society, and art criticism.

(A portrait on far right of the Regency Room was recently demoted as a Lawrence original, and is now believed to be a studio work. As such, Lawrence is the only significant Georgian portrait painter, not represented in the gallery’s collection, unlike Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Beechey who are all represented by excellent examples of their work).

[© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg 2011. This article is copyright, but the full or partial use is WELCOME with the full and proper acknowledgment]