the conversation piece

The New York Times ran a photograph of a painting by Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), because the Yale Center for British Art will be exhibiting his work.  Zoffany was born in Frankfurt, studied in Rome, and moved to England, where he would stay for most of his life. He was a specialist in painting small group scenes, a tradition that began in the Netherlands and found a niche in the England of George III (Zoffany would paint Queen Charlotte and her family twice, in fact).  These paintings, showing people in their homes, with their possessions, playing instruments, at meals, or outdoors on their estates all came to be known as "conversation pieces." Queen Elizabeth II has a large collection of Zoffany works and exhibited them in 2008-10, along with similar works by other artists, such as Sir Edwin Landseer's portrait of the young Queen Victoria and Albert, "Windsor Castle in Modern Times." Zoffany left England, lived in India for six years and returned home in 1779 to a world that no longer valued the conversation piece. But I am getting ahead of myself ....

I was originally drawn to the "conversation piece" painting because I thought it might be another instance of my Queen's Skirt idea (see two days ago and July 13). There is, in Zoffany's work,  a clear fascination with the silks at the window and the laces round the necks and the sheen on the cello, all to the exclusion of any kind of attention to the actual faces. Look at "The Gore Family" (1775-6), set one woman's face against another and try to find any difference between them.  I will concede that the two men's faces are distinct from one another, but still. So, a bit of Queen's Skirt, and yet, there's something else going on here. Look again:

This isn't merely a show of possessions. Yes, the wood of the instruments and the chairs is polished and carefully turned and yes, the skirts have all the requisite ruffles.  But look at the two things Zoffany has really painted with care: look first at the "window." Is it a window? Suddenly, we are outdoors! And we have a draped fabric, not a curtain, not a furnishing at all, but a transparent orange cloud, leading to a dramatic Tuscan hill (this was painted near Volterra) ... how beautiful that is! (Christo, are you there?). Then, second, look at the light in the painting behind the group. The art is (just ever so lightly) trumping the group sitting before it. (Ars longa, vita brevis?).  It could be a comment that this family values the work and wanted it as a focus, more than they wanted a recitation in paint of all their worldly goods. Or it could be the artist's trademark. See the next painting, the one that really caught my eye in miniature in the Times. It is "The Blair Family," from 1786-87:

The Queen's Skirt is alive here, too: look at the fabulous blue of Madame's robe. And yet, again, we have two anomalies. Here, again, we have the majesty of the paintings. The largest work is cut off at the top, and yet, the colors there and in the small side pieces dominate, picking up the color in the dress and then the center painting adds a shimmering pink -- just in case there was any doubt about where we should look. When I looked up Zoffany, I found that he was also known for painting people who did not live in stately houses; in the tradition of Velazquez, and Caravaggio, Zoffany painted ... faces. People. Look at the little girl holding the cat.

She is in there, gazing out at us, waiting for Courbet, Manet and other painters who would be able to gaze even more fully back at her.  So, look at these groupings, again, and try not to talk about these paintings with someone ... better yet, go to the Yale Center and see them for me.

The Queen's Skirt Explodes... again!

I have written here (July 13 entry and earlier) about my theory, that many portrait painters seem far more interested in tapestry, furs, gloves, emeralds, silks than they do the wealthy, even the royal, sitter's ... face.  And almost no-one gives us better satins than John Singer Sargent.  Sargent does have his fabulous moments, when he attains a Velazquez-ian dizziness, as here in the 1882 "El Jaleo":

Yes, we see her skirt lit by lamps ... but it is not the only focus. We see the gesture, the arms, the guitars that seems to be waiting for Picasso to make them Cubist ... we see life.  The painting asks us to move about inside of the frame. Our eyes do not become fixed on fabric. But then we look at a society portrait, here "Mrs. George Swinton" (nee Elizabeth "Elsie" Ebsworth) from 1897 and we see ... the Queen's skirt dilemma ... a beautiful problem, but still a problem:

She was a real person ... a rather significant personage, actually, a professional singer when that was not allowed ... but what we see, actually, is the lovely little chair and that magnificent sleeve and train. But I won't try and say it all myself. In an interview in the Guardian newspaper (7 September 2006), Jonathan Jones recalls that David Hockney had something to say about this work: "I remember seeing a Sargent in the Chicago Art Institute and thinking, fucking good you know, great, and even the bravura slickness, I admire it. And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh."  And then we look at the Van Gogh that Hockney saw:

Yes, we see the Seurat-style brushwork. But we don't care about that. What we see is the painter's gaze. Van Gogh's eyes.  We see the person. And the killer thing is that this portrait was painted ten years earlier than the portrait of Mrs. George Swinton.  And yet, it could have been painted a hundred years later, it is of such a different world. Hockney has also said that "Van Gogh could draw anything and make it enthralling... a rundown bathroom or a frayed carpet" (quoted in an article by Margaret Drabble, also in the Guardian, 17 October 2011).

Well might the Queen's skirt explode, in exasperation. (I mean that the fabrics, lovely as they are, are no substitute for a human face, and the Queen leaves in a huff).  Who can compete?

Paul Mellon and the Queen's Skirt... and an exception!

We went to the Yale Center for British Art, a compact, but wonderful collection of work from Paul Mellon's collection. We were lucky, someone told us, because there were no large special exhibitions, so more of the collection was on view than is normally the case. And what a collection ...  I took notes and photographs. Back (in this blog, in some detail) on June 7th, I had written about my Queen's skirt theory, where I argue that, often, portrait painters are more taken by the silks, the pearls, the furs, the embroidered details of dress, than they are by the wealthy or royal sitter's face.  And I found a couple of paintings that seemed to confirm my theory, nicely. The first is by Frederick Sandys, from 1866, called "Grace Rose":

She's lovely, but the vase and the roses and her necklace outshine her rather distant expression. Here is another, by Thomas Gainsborough, "Mary Little," from 100 years earlier, in 1763:

Again, lovely, a little more facial activity, but still, look at where he lavishes his attention:

The hand is like marble, perfect, but the poseys and the lace are alive. But, now, for the exception to the rule, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, "Mrs. Robinson," from a few years later, in 1784:

The clothing is, you should pardon the pun, immaterial.  Even the elaborate wig is scrubbed of extra details... what matters is this woman's profile.  She is herself, alone. She lived to be 42, and was painted by everyone .... but this has to be the definitive work. Go and see her. (There are hourly trains from Manhattan to New Haven, and the museum is free).

The Queen's Skirt Explodes, Part III, and Wendy Steiner and the Model

On May 5th and again on May 21, I talked about the ways that silks and satins and furs and jewels outshine the faces of Queens (and other elevated subjects, from Holbein to John Singer Sargent)... I had argued that one reason that we remember both a dress and an upholstered chair, but not always the expression of the supposed subject, from an Ingres painting, might be that the painter is displaying his talent: a well-painted pearl? ... another line on the resume.  It could also be that the subjects themselves, from a higher class, unused to sitting so long, were not terribly forthcoming, and the painter became lost in all the decorative touches (every gorgeous thing the sitter owned, very likely) which actually spoke to him.

The Queen, in her sittings in the atelier, bored, would probably be noticing the painter's model (there was always a favorite); the Queen would, in her stiff pose, with her elaborate dress, be trying (consciously or not) to outshine the model, to keep the painter's attention on her royal personage alone.  But the painter would be looking about, testing the light, seeing the familiar face, waiting, in the corner, and the model beckoned. I have always pictured this as a likely scenario, thinking that the model would be the dose of "real" life, something closer to the painter's own experience, that he would rather be attending to.

But I have been reading Wendy Steiner's book,  The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), and she discusses a short story by Henry James, "The Real Thing." A couple, the Monarchs (hmmm... Queen and King?) press the artist-narrator to engage them as models, as his wife, for example, is so lovely, and Steiner says "This is just the trouble ... for Mrs. Monarch is already an artistic cliche, and the artist seems unable to make any art based on her that is not equally unoriginal" (page 38).  And yet, when the artist considers his model, he sees that she is "'so little in herself'" and yet she encourages his leap to "'alchemy in art'" (38).  So I think I need to refine what I have been thinking, thanks to Steiner's interpetation of the story.

It isn't exactly that the model represents the "real," or is somehow more real;  it is that she, in what Steiner calls her "plasticity," can allow an artist to control the way she is represented, in a way that he cannot control the Queen's image.... He can create anything from his model. The Queen remains, stubbornly, herself. So, this is my new task for my next painting/drawing: a new Queen's skirt.

The Queen's Skirt Explodes, part II, this time with Bronzino's help

In a post on May 5th, I had written about the way that some portraits seems to privilege the satins and silks and ermines and jewels of their owners over... their faces, and I had given you a photograph of a painting from my series exploring the peculiarities of that subject...

And I have found a new painter who seduces with his brushed fabrics. Agnolo Bronzino, an extraordinarily talented Renaissance painter, lesser known than some of his contemporaries, has had two exhibitions devoted to him in the past year, one at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence last winter and the other at the Metropoitan Museum of Art in new York last winter and spring. The catalogues are out, and there is a review by the very perceptive Ingrid Rowland in The New York Review of Books from May 26 (pages 8-10).  It is a wonderful, thorough review; read it... it is really fine. She outlines the way he worked, his basing of some works on Michaelangelo's (and she reproduces a drawing as proof of this sculptural echo), and Cosimo de' Medici's choice of Bronzino as his court painter.  She mentions that Cosimo de' Medici thought in terms of politics, geography, education, and economics.  He did not, for example, import textiles; Cosimo "set up his own Florentine silk works" (p.10).  And, she says,  Bronzino "knew how to use art as a form of publicity"; as he painted Cosimo's consort, Eleonora de Toledo,  he painted those very textiles perfectly (p. 10). Look:

What stays with you? The dress. The child's face is easy to love, in part, I think, because his clothing is so softly done. Eleonora's face has no chance up against those patterns, the shoulder laces, the enormous stylized flower on her chest.  In Bronzino's defense, Rowland writes that perhaps Eleonora "seems less haughty than melancholy; she was probably already beginning to suffer from the consumption that eventually killed her" (p. 10).  Her face is very far removed from the foreground, it seems to me; perhaps because she was ill.  But we can imagine another version of this portrait, one where her face, pale and subtlety-done as it is, comes forward, where she is seen as a person who will soon not be here, and knows it, one where the dress fades into the distance because the person is what matters. Bronzino was more than skilled enough to create this other portrait, where the face is the thing ... and yet he chose the dress.  I have sometimes thought that when artists paint these ruffles and laces so perfectly that they are adding to their resume, saying, "if I can paint these, I can paint anything."  This seems more than a few lines on a resume... this may be the most civilized, and early form of ... dare I say it? ... advertisement, for the silks of Florence. They are lovely ...

The Queen's Skirt Explodes: silk vs. skin

I was looking at a series of paintings from 1994, a series I never exhibited. At the time, I was struck by a feature of most formal portraits that I have never seen anyone discuss at all. When Ingres painted the Princesse de Broglie in 1853, for example, he takes care with her face, and yet ... he takes far more care with her silk dress and bustle, and with the lace on her sleeves, even with the upholstery on the divan.  I think that one could argue that this is proving one's worth as a painter; if you can paint a rounded, gleaming pearl, you can paint anything. It's something of an artist's resume, the velvet, the silk, the fur, the amethyst. But what of the face, when there is so much detail in the fabric and the jewels?

I began a group of paintings that would illustrate the problem ... the wealthy patron arrives for her portrait, and she is far less interesting to the artist than the usual model (think of Manet and Matisse, who painted the same woman repeatedly ... certainly because something about her particular presence would become significant in the final work).  In the series, the Queen and the model ... clash. The model holds the artist's attention ... the Queen's skirt is actually the only thing keeping the painter looking in the Queen's direction. And so it goes ... here is the final work in the series, 38 x 50":