The Lost Portrait of Charles Dickens

In 1843, Charles Dickens sat for a portrait by the English painter Margaret Gillies. At the time, the author’s career seemed to be ebbing. After the spectacular success of Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby, readership for Martin Chuzzlewit was not only disappointing, it was actually declining with each succeeding installment in the series. His family was growing, and they had just moved from 48 Doughty Street to #1 Devonshire Terrace, across from Regent’s Park (and a step up from the earlier address). 

He was working almost feverishly on another project, but his publisher insisted that he share the costs of the expensive binding and illustrations he wanted to use. The project had begun as a treatise on the treatment of children in Victorian London’s slums, but Dickens had quickly realized it would have a greater impact as a story. So, while sitting for his portrait, the 31-year-old author was working to finish A Christmas Carol.

 

Gillies, the painter, loved the portrait, so much, in fact, that she exhibited it at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1844. A steel engraving was made of the painting and reproduced many times. But, after the exhibition, the painting vanished. It would reappear until more than 173 years had passed, and when it did, it was in South Africa. It showed up with other materials meant for auction; at first, no one realized what it was. It was also showing signs of mold, a sure sign it had been left in someone’s attic or cellar and forgotten. 

 

The identification was finally made and confirmed, and the painting restoration, has made its way to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. Charles Dickens: The Lost Portrait is the short, 52-page account of the painting’s creation and rediscovery, including some educated speculation as to how it made its way from London to South Africa, likely in the 1850s or 1860s. 

 

The short book includes several essays. The English art dealer Philip Mould, who played a critical role in the painting’s return to England, introduces the book. Emma Rutherford describes how the portrait was painted. Lawrence Hendra provides the informed speculation on the painting’s provenance and how it likely went to South Africa. Lucinda Dickens Hawksley provides an overview of what was going on in Dickens’s life in the 1840s. And Louisa Price provides an interesting discussion of related objects in the Dickens Museum collection that help explain the man’s life.

 

If you’re a fan of Dickens, as I’ve confessed many times to be, or if you’re interested in painting, portraits, and art mysteries, Charles Dickens: The Lost Portrait is a fascinating story. 

“East End Vernacular” by The Gentle Author

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon during our most recent trip to London, we traveled the tube from our hotel in Westminster to the Liverpool Street Station in London’s East End. We walked up Bishopsgate from the station to Brushfield Street, and then to the Spitalfields Market, filled with booths of art, clothes, food, and more. After lunch, we walked down Commercial Street to Christ Church and then over to Brick Lane, following the street south to Whitechapel and the Whitechapel Gallery. It was a beautiful day to see a part of London we had never previously visited.

The inspiration for this visit was a blog, one I’d been visiting for some time called Spitalfields Life. Who actually writes the blog posts is something of an online mystery – the writer is known as “The Gentle Author” and lives somewhere on Brick Lane, writing wonderful blog posts about London’s East End – its people, its history, its streets, and its contribution to life in London. And the writer publishes books.

The latest is East End Vernacular: Artists Who Painted London’s East End Streets in the 20^th Century, and what a beautiful book it is.

“Vernacular” refers to the commercial, work-a-day, working class associations of the East End. This is a region of London that included factories, warehouses, working class residences, and the slums of Whitechapel. The people who lived here worked in the factories and on the docks, markets and small commercial establishments. And while artists before the 20^th century had drawn and painted scenes there (including James McNeill Whistler), it was the indigenous artists of the 20^th century who found the region’s spirit and soul.

The names won’t necessarily be familiar to American or even British ears. Nathaniel Kornbluth. Pearl Binder. Brothers Harold and Walter Steggles. Grace Oscroft. Cyril Mann. Roland Collins. Dorothy Bishop. Geoffrey Fletcher. Peri Parkes. Leon Kosoff. And quite a few more. Most if not all of them were born and grew up in the East End. Some worked in their fathers’ shops. Many held full-time jobs, squeezing in what they could paint from a bedroom window.

The artists were often self-taught or came under the guidance of local arts organizations. Often the “big boys” in London art would take notice, and many of the works would find their way to the Tate, the Royal Academy, and various exhibitions. The Whitechapel Gallery often played a critical role in bringing these artists to wider public attention.

Like any good curator, The Gentle Author has been selective, choosing some outstanding works. What the included paintings share is simplicity in form and color (some are reminiscent of the works of Edward Hopper) and common themes of streets, buildings, and scenes that are often still familiar (I recognized a few from my brief afternoon journey) even though the artists often knew that the area was changing and wanted to capture it before it disappeared.

The Gentle Author has published of numerous books by others about London’s East End, including A Hoxton Childhood, Brick Lane, Travellers’ Children in London Fields, East End, and The Boss of Bethnal Green, among others. Others include Spitalfields Life, The Gentle Author’s London Album, and Cries of London (links to all of the books can be found on the Spitalfields Life web site).

You can scroll through posts at Spitalfields Life and see examples of many of these artists. But to see them together as a published collection like East End Vernacular is something rather marvelous.

Top painting: Old Houses in Bow by Grace Oscroft (1934).

The Abstract Art of Agnes Martin

It may be the space – a refurbished power plant with a spectacular open interior several stories high. It may be the shop for art and related books. And it may be that I’m understanding modern art better than I did. But since 2012, when we started making annual pilgrimages to London for vacation, the Tate Modern is one of my favorite art museums in the city.

In 2012, our hotel was on the South Bank, near Westminster Bridge. The Tate Modern was around the bend in the Thames, across from St. Paul’s Cathedral. I could “walk the hypotenuse” from our hotel and considerably shorten the distance. I went three times that year, once to see it, a second time to see the Edvard Munch exhibit, and a third time to see the museum again.

This year, my growing understanding of modern and contemporary art was to be tested at the Tate, with an exhibition of the paintings of American Agnes Martin. It’s officially abstract art, but I won’t argue with anyone who wants to call it minimalist. Pastel minimalist, in fact.

The Islands, 1961

Martin (1912-2004) was born in Canada but eventually landed in Washington State, where she finished high school. She trained as a teacher, but went on to Columbia University in New York to study fine art and art education. After study at the University of New Mexico and a return to Columbia, she became interested in East Asian thought. After receiving her masters in 1952, she went to Taos, New Mexico, doing teaching and other work to support her art.

The exhibition covered her work from the early 1950s to her death in 2004. I paid the fee (about US $18) and walked through rooms initially containing small paintings, gradually giving way to larger and larger works. There was a calm, a serenity about these paintings. They were about light color, in mostly pastel shades, and minimalism is a suitable description for many of them. (As it turned out, my favorite work in the exhibition was entitled “The Book,” a smallish painting that was the least abstract work of all of them.)

Agnes Martin in 1954

These paintings are not about passion; if anything, they suggest the absence of passion. The almost-faded colors of many of them, the similarities they exhibited, and the presence of lines and geometric shapes suggested a detachment, a separation from the world. I wasn’t left cold but I was left feeling distant, a very different response from the exhibition of Martin’s British contemporary, Barbara Hepworth, at the Tate Modern’s sister museum, the Tate Britain.

I enjoyed the exhibition, but I can’t say I became a fan of Martin’s work. Perhaps it was too detached, too zen. I kept straining to hear the winds of New Mexico but instead heard only a rather marked silence.

Resources on Agnes Martin and her work

Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances by Arne Glimcher.

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal.

Agnes Martin by Briony Fer.

Agnes Martin by Lynne Cooke, Editor.

The Agnes Martin page at Artsy.net.

Painting, top: Happy Holiday, oil on canvas by Agnes Martin, 1999.

“J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free”

Last fall, we had the opportunity to see an exhibition of paintings by J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), considered one of the best English painters ever. The exhibition, “Late Turner: Painting Set Free,” was at the Tate Britain, which has a rather large collection of Turner paintings – the result of a bequest by Turner to the British nation. From London, the exhibition traveled to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.

We wandered through the exhibition galleries, still fighting off jet lag and not helped one bit by the rather low lighting. The paintings were from Turner’s final years, covering roughly 1835 to his death in 1851. What struck me was how contemporary many of the paintings seemed, and one could even view some of the paintings as anticipating Impressionism.

Except they don’t. In the book that accompanied the exhibition, J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, the editors and authors argue for understanding Turner in his own time, his final years coinciding with the early years of the Victorian period. His paintings addressed the audience of his time.

Turner in middle age

Evidence for that, for example, is the painting pictured at top. Entitled “The Fighting Temeraire,” it was painted in 1839 and depicts the retirement of a magnificent sailing ship, being led to its place in the scrap yard. The age of sail was passing; the age of steam had arrived. And no painting captured the transition better than “The Fighting Temeraire,” one of Turner’s most popular works. The audience of 1839 understood exactly the point Turner was making int hat painting, whereas today, without any of the background, we might simply see a sailing ship being moved by a tug boat.

The book, edited by David Blayney Brown, Amy Concannon and Sam Smiles, is filled with information like that. And it’s information in a readable, accessible style, and not what one might expect from an exhibition book. It’s divided into two sections: five relatively short essays covering large topics, and the exhibition catalogue, divided into seven sections covering the paintings, watercolors and other items in the exhibition.

The five general essays cover Turner in his own time and later; the final years of his life; an interpretation of what was happening in his later works; the watercolors he produced during the last years of his life; and his materials and technique.

The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842)

At the Tate exhibition, I enjoyed the watercolors as much as the oil paintings. In fact, the work I kept coming back to was a watercolor, “The Blue Rigi,” a mountain on Lake Geneva (and I’ve posted it several times here; I like it so much I’m posting it again).

The catalog section of the book provides extensive information on each work in the exhibition, and it was only reading the book that I discovered that quite a few of the works shown at the Tate in London did not travel to the exhibitions in California.

J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free is a fine work, filled with information about and understanding of the artist, and a book that easily stands on its own. Recently rereading it, however, did take me back a year to that exhibition at the Tate.

Related:

My post on Turner the movie: http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2015/01/mr-turner-movie-thats-painting.html

My review of Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Turner: http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2012/12/peter-ackroyds-turner.html

My review of James Wilson’s The Dark Clue, a mystery based on the life of Turner http://faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com/2014/10/james-wilsons-dark-clue.html

If you’re interested in Turner, his paintings, and particularly his later years, the movie Mr. Turner was released in 2014, with actor Timothy Spall wonderfully playing the title character.

“Edward Hopper: Portraits of America”

I attended the School of Journalism at LSU from 1970 to 1973. It was a kind of twilight time for journalism; the upheavals of the 1960s hadn’t left LSU untouched but it was certainly less than elsewhere. And journalism was still framed by what was called objectivity – a philosophy developed by Walter Lippmann and others. According to the American Press Institute, “Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”

Objectivity was the child of modernism, which had replaced realism. And it had quite a long run, as did modernism itself, which wasn’t limited to journalism but also affected literature, poetry, science, culture, architecture – and all of American and Western culture. In poetry, the “big three” modernists were T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens.

It was modernism that framed education and understanding for my journalism teachers, and which in turn framed my own education and understanding. (Journalism would change dramatically with the Watergate scandal of 1973 and then yet again with the rise of post-modernism in the 1980s and 1990s.) But I believe the “modernist” influences on me is one reason why I’m so attracted to the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967).

In Edward Hopper: Portraits of America (originally published in 1995 as Edward Hopper: Images of America), Wieland Schmied (1929-2014) borrows the phrase “transcendental objectivity” from the painter Max Beckmann and applies it to Hopper’s visual world. And he quotes Hopper himself as once describing his work as “the objectivity of inner visions.”

Part of objectivity is putting distance between one’s self and the object being studied (or painted). You can see and sense that distance in Hopper’s paintings; the artist is separate from the scenes and people he’s depicting with his brush. Even the more intimate paintings, Like the women in their bedrooms and the usherette in the theater, have an air of detachment about them, as if Hopper couldn’t get too close or he might lose himself. 

But these paintings are American paintings, or paintings of America, snapshots of almost six decades of scenes and people distinctly American. It says much about Schmied, who was an Austrian art critic, art historian and for a time the director of the National Gallery in Berlin, that he has captured the essence of Hopper so well.

The book is less a formal book and more a long, extended essay, surrounded by Hopper’s paintings, walking the reader through the decades of the artist’s working life, watching him as he grew artistically and developed into one of America’s foremost painters of the 20^th century. We can see the stories the paintings tell but the artist’s objectivity doesn’t allow us to enter the stories. We watch, we observe, we understand, but we only imagine our own feelings.

Painting, top: Chop Suey by Edward Hopper, oil on canvas; 1929. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Painting, bottom: Self-Portrait by Edward Hopper, oil on canvas, 1925-1930; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

A Visit to Impressionist France

Tuesday night, we went to a wine-and-cheese reception at the St. Louis Art Museum. The reception was for members only (they do member-only events on a regular basis), and this one included either audio tours or docent-led tours of the museum’s latest exhibition, Impressionist France.

The exhibition was in the museum’s new East Building, which opened last year and is mostly dedicated to contemporary art (lots of Gerhard Richter paintings there, which I generally like and my wife generally doesn’t). And what an exhibition it was – almost a century of French photography and painting, arranged by themes but all generally aspects of the building of France as a nation.

The exhibit is a joint project of the Nelson Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City and the St. Louis Art Museum. It was curated by Simon Kelly of the St. Louis museum for the paintings, and April Watson of the Nelson Atkins museum for photography. And it is a marvelous show.

We chose to do one of the docent-led tours, which started with a short discussion by Simon Kelly about the exhibit, French Impressionism, and the importance of photography to Impressionism. On the tour, our docent moved us to and from about 10 stops, focusing upon a particular painting or photograph to represent specific points. In addition to sharing what was clearly a lot of knowledge, she carried with her laminated photographs of the painters and photographers which she would pass among the tour group.

As we walked, observed and listened, I began to meditate a bit on art, and why it has come to be something much more important now that I’m older than when I was young. We’ve always enjoyed art and art museums, going back to a spectacular Cezanne exhibit at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston in early 1978. But it seems more important now, more engaging, and we try to include it whenever we travel.

I don’t think it’s just us. This seems to happen with age. As one gets older, one gets more interested in art. Perhaps it’s because older people have more leisure time (or disposable income). Looking at the crowd at the reception last night, I would say more were over the age of 50.

I think it might be someone else, too. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to see art as some akin to divine creation. Whether it is literature, art, music, photography, or other artistic endeavors, creating something “out of nothing” is something of a human echo of the original creation. Part of what it means to be made in God’s image is to be made in his creative image; it’s almost as if we can’t help ourselves – we are made to create.

If you have the opportunity, you should see this exhibit. We’re going back, and likely more than once. The creators of the works on display read like a history of French photography and art: Le Gray, Corot, Rousseau, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Cezanne, Manet, and Morisot.

And I’ll try to figure out where they put the Gerhard Richters in the meantime.

Painting: The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge, Arguentil, oil on canvas by Claude Monet (1874), St. Louis Art Museum. 

Photograph: Adalbert Cuvelier, French, 1812–1871, printed by: Alphonse-Louis Poitevin, French, 1819–1882; Effect of Fog, 1852, printed 1855.

A Painting Tells a Story, But Which One?

This article first appeared at The Christian Manifesto.

In 1864, the French painter Edouard Manet finished “The Dead Christ with Angels,” which he then sent to that year’s Salon for exhibition. It is a picture of the dead Christ with two angels in the tomb, based (rather loosely) on Mary Magdalene’s sighting of the angels after Jesus’ death. (In the Biblical account, Mary Magdalene only sees the angels, not the body of Christ.)

After it was on its way, the painter realized he had made an error – he painted Christ’s wound from the soldier’s spear on the side of the body, instead of the right. Manet wrote to his friend, the writer Charles Baudelaire, asking advice on what to do. Baudelaire advised him to fix it before the Salon opened, or face ridicule. Manet did not repaint the wound, and he was indeed ridiculed.

It is a moving painting, and oddly more modern-looking than 1864 might suggest. It is one of several religious-themed works that Manet did about that time, and at first glance it seems quite orthodox, aside from the placement of the wound.

But look more closely, and something else becomes apparent. The story of the exchange with Baudelaire notwithstanding, something else is going on this painting, and it suggests a kind of warning for Christians about both “serious” and popular culture.

Look in painting’s the lower right-hand corner, and you will see a snake slithering through rocks. What’s brought to mind is Genesis 3:15, where God tells Adam and Eve about the one to come, who will be bruised on his heel but will bruise the serpent on its head – the passage that is considered the first reference to the promise of the messiah. The snake in Manet’s painting is anything but dead or injured, while Christ is clearly dead (although you can see the halo above his head).

Step back and look at the painting as a whole, and you see the angels attending to the body of the dead Christ and the healthy snake slithering away. The angel on the left does appear sad; the angel attending directly to the dead Christ looks – what? Impassive? They don’t seem ready to announce that He is risen as much as that He’s dead, and they’re there to take him to heaven.

The story can go in one of two directions. Either it is right before Christ is resurrected and the angels’ announcement of that, or it is a new narrative, in which Christ is just another saint, and His soul is being escorted to heaven. The snake’s situation is equally ambiguous – it’s either right before the bruising of its head or there will be no bruising at all, and the serpent is perhaps just a serpent after all.

Manet himself inscribed the painting with the Bible verse reference – John 20:12: Mary is standing outside the tomb and bends over to look inside “and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.” The two angels in the painting are in shades of brown, not white; they are not at the head and the foot but on either side. Whatever one wants to say about the painting, it is not a literal rendering of the verse Manet based it on.

The painting, and the stories it may be telling, serve as a reminder for us about culture. It’s not that we should always, always be literal in how we participate in culture. It is more that we be careful, and not leave what we’re doing so open to two very different (and opposite) interpretations. Manet painted either a religious painting loosely based on scripture, or he painted what looks like an anti-Christian one.

Painting: The Dead Christ with Angels, oil on canvas by Edouard Manet (1864), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.