Category Archives: Art

Art

Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast At Cana (1563)

November 26, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Great art comes in many shapes and sizes, from portrait miniatures right up to monumental canvases depicting epic scenes with casts of thousands. Today we’re going to look at an example of the latter, one which hangs in the Louvre and deserves to have the same-sized crowd of admirers that perpetually gather around the Mona Lisa there (and perhaps it does usually, but I do have a memory of being able to admire it unmolested by other people and able to take in its considerable features). It’s Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (Nozze di Cana, 1562–1563), depicting the biblical story of the Wedding at Cana, in which Jesus miraculously converts water into wine, thus justifying his invitation several times over.

It’s a whopping 6.77 m × 9.94 m and indeed as such it’s the largest painting in the Louvre. Veronese executed his painting slap-bang in the middle of the period in art known as the Mannerist age (c.1520‑c.1600), in which there was a tendency of artists to take the ideals of the High Renaissance (1490–1527) — proportion, balance, ideal beauty – and exaggerate them such that arrangements of human figures have an unnatural rather than a realistic feel to them. It’s as if artists felt that everything that could be achieved had already been achieved by the likes of Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo, and they needed a different approach.

The canvas was originally hung in the San Georgio Monastery in Venice, until Napoleon’s soldiers nicked it as war booty in 1797. It depicts a crowded banquet scene in the sumptuous style characteristic of 16th century Venetian society but framed in the Greco-Roman architectural style of classical antiquity. There are 130 human figures dressed fashionably in Occidental and Oriental costume alla Turca, and there are indications that we are post-feast, with guests sated and awaiting the wine service.

In the foreground are musicians playing stringed instruments of the late Renaissance, with legend having it that the musician in the white tunic is a depiction of Veronese himself and the other musicians modelled on fellow artists Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Titian. Behind the musicians are seated Jesus of Nazareth, the Virgin Mary, and several apostles. Amongst the wedding guests are depicted many historical personages from Veronese’s day, such as Mary I of England, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Suleiman the Magnificent. There are so many quirky elements to discover– a little dog on the table here, a lady picking her teeth there, a dwarf holding a bright green parrot – that to do so could take up some considerable time.

Here are some details (click on them to enlarge), with the whole masterpiece in its entirety below.

Art

James Cox’s Silver Swan Automaton (1774)

November 10, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Visitors to the Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle in County Durham are regularly blown away by the treasures housed in this provincial town, miles away from the major cities where art collections of this quality may be expected. The building alone is worth the visit; it is elaborately modelled in the style of the French Second Empire, purpose-built to house the art collection of John Bowes, and opened to the public in 1892.

The collection contains paintings by El Greco, Goya, Canaletto, Fragonard and Boucher, as well as items of decorative art, ceramics, textiles, tapestries, clocks and costumes. The pièce de résistance, however, is today’s subject, the Silver Swan automaton, created by London jeweller James Cox and the inventor John Joseph Merlin.

The Silver Swan was first recorded in 1774 as a crowd puller at the famous Cox’s Museum of James Cox, an entrepreneur as well as a talented jeweller. The exquisitely crafted swan has an internal clockwork-driven mechanism with 2000 moving parts (designed by Merlin), and at an appointed time each day at Bowes Museum, the automaton is cranked up and goes through its 32-second performance.

The swan sits in a stream made of glass rods and surrounded by silver leaves, and small silver fish can be seen “swimming” in the stream. When the clockwork is wound, the music box plays and the glass rods rotate giving the illusion of flowing water. The swan turns its head from side to side, preens itself, and after a few moments bends down to catch and eat a fish. The swan’s head then returns to the upright position and the performance is over.

The Silver Swan was exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition, and it was here that John Bowes and his wife saw it, fell in love with it, and in 1872 had the opportunity to purchase it (for £200, or about £20,000 in today’s money, still an absolute steal). The American novelist Mark Twain also saw the Silver Swan at the Paris exhibition in 1867 and described it in his book The Innocents Abroad:

I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes – watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop – watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it…

If this inspires you to see the swan for yourself, leave it a few months: it is currently being restored but is expected to return to its public next year.

Art

George Stubbs’ Cheetah And Stag With Two Indians (1765)

October 13, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

If you happen to be in Manchester with a spare hour or two, do call into its art gallery on Mosley Street where you’ll find a host of interesting paintings, not least of which is Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians by George Stubbs. Stubbs was an English artist, born in Liverpool in 1724 and who moved to York in 1744 to pursue his passion for human anatomy, studying under the surgeon Charles Atkinson at York County Hospital. He was also a natural and entirely self-taught artist, and worked as a portrait painter in York for ten more years, but he would become famous later not for painting human sitters but animal ones, particularly horses (of which his best-known, Whistlejacket, is at the National Gallery in London).

By 1764, Stubbs had established a reputation for his anatomically accurate animal paintings, and attracted the attention of the royal court, who had commissioned him, the year before, to paint Queen Charlotte’s South African zebra. He was, then, the obvious choice when a certain outgoing Governor General of Madras, Sir George Pigot, arrived back in London with a menagerie of “wild beasts and curiosities” as gifts for King George III, and was looking for an artist to paint a portrait of the most exotic of those gifts, a magnificent cheetah.

Easily tamed and trained, cheetahs had been used as hunting animals by the Mogul Emperors for hundreds of years. In that spirit, the King’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, was eager to put the King’s cheetah through its paces and so arranged a demonstration in Windsor Great Park, where George Stubbs was present to capture the occasion on canvas.

A stag was duly placed in an enclosure of the royal paddock while the cheetah was prepared by Pigot’s Indian servants. First, they ‘hoodwinked’ the animal by tying a red blindfold over its face, whilst one of the servants held it by a restraining sash around the hindquarters. A servant then pulled back the hood back to allow the cheetah a first sight of its quarry, whilst the other one gestured towards the stag, and the predator was unleashed. What happened next was not quite what was intended: according to the St James’s Chronicle the stag staunchly defended itself and ended up chasing the cheetah off!

The painting has been praised for its sincere rendering and lack of European condescension: in an age when foreign visitors were pictured at best as colourful exotics, at worst as sinister or ridiculous caricatures, Stubbs endowed the servants with a grace and authenticity equal to the magnificent creature they were caring for.

Postscript Cheetahs are no longer to be found wild in the Indian sub-continent: the last three individuals were reportedly shot in 1947 by the Maharajah of Surguja.

Art

Wassily Kandinsky’s Yellow-Red-Blue (1925)

August 18, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 2 Comments

My appreciation of art spans many centuries. I’ve marvelled at the Greco-Romano art of the classical world; contemplated frescoes adorning Byzantine monasteries and churches in Turkey, Armenia and Cyprus; spent hours in galleries musing over paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, through the eras of Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism to late nineteenth-century Impressionism and on to…well to be honest, when we hit the twentieth century, my enthusiasm starts to wane. Sure, Art Deco was a bona fide, aesthetically pleasing and innovative art movement, and Cubism had its place, but when I start to consider Surrealism, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, I’m less impressed.

Sure, sure: it’s eminently possible to sit and enjoy a monumental and vibrant Jackson Pollock canvas in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — and I have done — and there will always be exceptional and intriguing art to be found throughout the twentieth century. But my contention is that overall these tend to be outliers, and that in amongst the gems there is a broad seam of distinctly uncaptivating art. You can enjoy a Mark Rothko but can you really be captivated by it? I can’t. And don’t get me started on the truly modern “art” of the last four decades, the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Martin Creed et al…please!

Having said that, I’m going to give a free pass to one of the head honchos of Abstract Expressionism, the Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). With Kandinsky I can embrace the new century vibe and be inspired by all that art theory behind colour and form. Kandinsky wrote voluminously about art theory: his writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the 1910 treatise On the Spiritual in Art were bold affirmations that all forms of art can reach a level of spirituality. He founded the short-lived but influential Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, and Albert Bloch, who experimented boldly with colour, lines and form, and gave priority to spontaneity and improvisation.

Kandinsky’s paintings are expressive explosions of colours, lines and shapes that have an extraordinary force and musical quality about them. Kandinsky recognised that there were important connections between music and abstract art: music is abstract by nature and does not try to represent the exterior world but instead expresses the immediate inner feelings of the soul. That is why Kandinsky referred to his works as “compositions”. I get it. I seem to remember having this composition — 1925’s Yellow-Red-Blue (Gelb-Rot-Blau) — on my kitchen wall in the nineties, and, to extend the musical metaphor, I find it rather jazzy!

Art

Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (1971)

June 9, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

As a boy, the Beano was my comic of choice, with occasional forays into the Beezer, the Topper, and the Dandy. Later, Warlord would come along, a now largely forgotten boys’ comic featuring stories centred around Lord Peter Flint (codename “Warlord”), Union Jack Jackson and Bomber Braddock (I would write to the comic for its free pack to become a “Warlord agent” with a badge and everything). By the eighties, all grown up, I had pretty much done with comics, but one notable exception came along in the guise of the series of underground comics written and drawn by Gilbert Shelton and featuring the “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”.

The Freak Brothers were a trio of hippie stoners whose lives revolved around the procurement of recreational drugs and whose chaotic lives led them on various adventures. First appearing in 1968 in the underground counterculture newspaper The Rag, published in Austin, Texas, the characters were emblematic of the blooming hippie culture of the late sixties and soon would graduate to a dedicated comic book of their own: Shelton co-founded Rip Off Press in 1969 and published 13 issues of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic between 1971 and 1997 (so no, it was no weekly comic, it was issued as and when Shelton finished his latest piece). How they came onto my radar, I’m not entirely certain, though I was possibly drawn by the vibrant and promising covers:

The “brothers” (who were not actually siblings) consisted of Fat Freddy (overweight, yellow curly hair, moustache), Freewheelin’ Franklin (tall, skinny, bulbous nose, Mexican moustache, cowboy hat, ponytail) and Phineas Phreak (bushy black hair, joint-shaped nose). They live in San Francisco (where else?) and their adventures often serve to foil Norbert the Nark, the inept DEA agent who is continually trying, and failing, to arrest them. Meanwhile, a bonus comic strip at the foot of the page featured feline anti-hero, Fat Freddy’s Cat (which spawned its own spin-off comic series).

With drug use being the dominant theme, the stories are very much in line with the shenanigans of contemporaneous on-screen homologues Cheech and Chong. Far be it from me to confess some kind of fraternity with law-breaking drug-takers conspicuously failing to be model citizens but what can I say, I’m a cultural observer! Shelton’s comics are richly humorous and brilliantly drawn, even if very much of their time. They must have clicked with a whole generation of boomers for whom, as Freewheelin’ Franklin said, “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope”.

Art

Canaletto’s The Mouth Of The Grand Canal Looking West Towards The Carità (1730)

March 31, 2023 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

If you visit London’s National Gallery’s Room 38 you will see a fine collection of paintings by Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697–1768), the Italian artist famed for his vedute of Venice (a veduta is a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or print of a cityscape or some other vista). He was born in Venice, the son of another painter, Bernardo Canal, hence his mononym Canaletto, or “little Canal” (and nothing to do with the Venetian canals that he later depicted). Canaletto was apprenticed to his father whose main career was in theatre set design, so he got to work on painting theatrical scenes for operas by the likes of Vivaldi, Scarlatti and others. However, it was when, in around 1723, he began to paint the daily life of Venice and its people, that he found his true calling.

Canaletto sold many of his grand scenes of the canals of Venice and the Doge’s Palace to Englishmen on their Grand Tour, and his career really took off when he began his association with Joseph Smith, an English businessman and collector living in Venice who was to become British Consul in Venice in 1744. Smith became the artist’s principal agent and patron, and was instrumental in introducing Grand Tourists to his work and arranging commissions. He also acquired nearly fifty paintings and one hundred fifty drawings from Canaletto, the largest and finest single group of the artist’s works, which he sold to King George III in 1762.

In the 1740s, the War of the Austrian Succession led to a reduction in the number of British visitors to Venice (war can do that) and thus disrupted Canaletto’s market, and so in 1746 he moved to London, living in London’s Soho district and successfully producing views of London and of his patrons’ houses and castles. He remained in England until 1755 and returned to Venice where he continued to paint until his death in 1768. His connection with Britain had been sealed, however, and now you can find his paintings not only in the National Gallery but in Buckingham Palace, the Wallace Collection and indeed there’s a fine set of 24 in the dining room at Woburn Abbey.

Here is just one from the Royal Collection, The Mouth of the Grand Canal looking West towards the Carità (1729–30), and then a view of the exquisite Woburn Abbey dining room.

Canaletto, The Mouth of the Grand Canal looking West towards the Carita, c.1729–30,

Art

Jacques-Louis David’s Oath Of The Horatii (1784)

November 25, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

A generation or two before the Impressionists, French artists didn’t have the luxury of lolling about fields painting haystacks and generally having a wheeze of a time. At a time of seismic social and political change, an artist had to box clever to stay on the right side of dangerous political forces. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was one such painter who managed to successfully navigate his way — and his art — from the final years of the Ancien Régime through the French Revolution and the rise and fall of Napoleon.

David was considered to be the preeminent painter of the Neoclassical era, that return to the high-minded severity of the arts of ancient Greece and Rome in contrast to the frivolity of the late Baroque. David’s history painting matched the moral climate of the final years of Louis XVI and he was favoured by the Court. However, David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Robespierre, and his Death of Marat (1793) became one of the most famous images of the era.

Imprisoned briefly after Robespierre’s fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release: that of Napoleon, the First Consul of France. As well as his suitably heroic rendering of Napoleon in his Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), he also created the monumental The Coronation of Napoleon (1806). Finally, after Napoleon’s fall from power and the Bourbon revival, David exiled himself to Brussels, where he remained until his death.

However, let’s return to David’s origins with a painting considered a Neoclassical masterpiece, Oath of the Horatii (1784). It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a seventh-century BC dispute between two warring cities, Rome and Alba Longa. Instead of the two cities sending their armies to war, they agree to choose three men from each city; the victor in that fight will be the victorious city. From Rome, three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, agree to fight three brothers from a family of Alba Longa, the Curiatii.

The three Horatii brothers, willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of Rome, are shown saluting their father who holds their swords out for them. There could be no more evocative a scene of patriotic duty and, although painted four years before the Revolution, it nonetheless became a symbol of loyalty to State and a defining image of the time.

Of the three Horatii brothers, only one will survive the confrontation and he will kill each Curiatii brother in turn, seizing victory for Rome. Aside from the three brothers depicted, David also represents, in the bottom right corner, a woman crying. She is Camilla, a sister of the Horatii, who happens to be also betrothed to one of the Curiatii fighters, and thus she weeps in the realisation that, whatever happens, she will lose someone she loves.

Art

Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch Of The Glen (1851)

October 1, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 1 Comment

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) was a London-born painter and sculptor whose artistic talents were recognised early on: at age thirteen he exhibited works at the Royal Academy as an “Honorary Exhibitor” and was elected as an Associate there at the minimum age of twenty four. He was able to paint extremely quickly and perhaps these days would have attracted a cool nickname like snooker players Hurricane Higgins and Whirlwind White (Lightning Landseer, perhaps); he was also reputed to be able to draw simultaneously with both hands. One biographer wrote:

…upon the occasion of a large party assembled one evening at the house of a gentleman in London, the conversation having turned upon the subject of feats of skill with the hand, one of the ladies present remarked that it would be impossible for anyone, however skilful, to draw two things at once.
“Oh, I can do that,” said Landseer quietly; “give me two pencils and I will show you.” The pencils were brought, and Landseer, taking one in each hand, drew simultaneously and unhesitatingly the profile of a stag’s antlered head with one hand, and with the other the perfect outline of the head of a horse.

Certainly, Landseer’s renown stemmed from his paintings of animals, particularly horses, dogs and stags, although his most famous work is undoubtedly the set of four bronze lion sculptures at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Today’s subject is probably his next most famous work, though, being, as it is, the ultimate biscuit tin image of Scotland: The Monarch of the Glen.

The Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-canvas painting depicting a red deer stag, set against the steamy rugged hills of the Scottish Highlands. It was completed in 1851 as part of a series of three panels intended to hang in the Refreshment Rooms of the House of Lords, although that commission never came off due to some dispute or other and it was sold into private ownership. It also, however, sold widely in reproductions and became one of the most popular paintings of the 19th century. It probably helped that Queen Victoria was a big fan.

The painting was purchased in 1916 by the Pears soap company and this kicked off the Monarch’s career in advertising. It was sold on to John Dewar & Sons distillery and became their trademark before similarly being used by Glenfiddich on their whisky bottles. A derivative of the Monarch graced the shelves of Harrods and Fortnum & Mason via the cans of Baxter’s Royal Game Soup, and of course, as implied, it adorned many a tin of shortbread biscuits. In 2017, the painting was finally sold by its last owner Diageo to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it can now be viewed by the public in all its majesty.

The stag has twelve points on his antlers, which in deer terminology makes him a “royal stag” not a “monarch stag”, for which sixteen points are needed, but let’s not quibble; he’s a magnificent beast.

Art

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog (1818)

August 6, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Back in 2016 when I introduced this blog (here) and the sense of the “sublime” as something of excellence “occasionally glimpsed” herein, I mentioned that the concept of the sublime was one with a long history of being debated by artists and writers over the centuries. I can pad that idea out a bit now, since it has a direct connection to the subject of this week’s blog, and so for fun and edification, here’s a little potted history or mini-essay on the concept of the sublime.

The first known study of the concept was the 1^st century AD treatise On The Sublime, ascribed to Longinus and which talks about the use of great or lofty language, intended to inspire awe or veneration, in the field of rhetoric. This treatise was rediscovered in the 16^th century and translated into English and French in the following decades, and it had a significant influence on literary criticism and the philosophy of aesthetics in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

The concept was developed in Britain in the early 18^thcentury and came to describe an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty, brought into prominence by the writings of John Dennis (1693), Joseph Addison (1705) and Anthony Ashley-Cooper (1709). All three of these authors had undertaken a crossing of the Alps, as part of that familiar Enlightenment pastime the “Grand Tour”, and all three independently expressed their contrasting feelings of fear and pleasure at the awesomeness of nature and derived, as Addison described it, “an agreeable kind of horror”.

Edmund Burke more formally developed this conception of sublimity in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756, and German philosophers Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Rudolf Otto each added their academic heft to the subject. Soon, the concept would be realised in the art movement known as Romanticism and we would see the portrayal of landscape in an entirely new manner: not just a visualisation of the simple enjoyment of a beautiful view, as in the classic conception, but rather an examination of a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature and its majestic power.

German artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) was instrumental in creating this notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling: die romantische Stimmungslandschaft. Friedrich’s paintings commonly employed the Rückenfigur, a person seen from behind, contemplating the landscape and inviting the viewer to similarly place himself in that medium and experience the sublime potential of nature. The Friedrich painting that is above all used to characterise this concept is his 1818 oil on canvas, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

It depicts a man standing upon a rocky precipice and gazing out across a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog through which other ridges, trees, and mountains pierce. It is considered one of the masterpieces of the Romanticism movement and to successfully evoke the sublime or Addison’s “agreeable horror”.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Art

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1512)

July 2, 2022 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Well, I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, what with the Creation of Adam being astride the top of these blogs week in, week out: it’s time to look at that apex predator of the Renaissance art world, and number one cause of visitors’ neck strain, the Sistine Chapel. No visit to Rome is complete without it, and perhaps no blog on the sublime can afford to omit it.

First, a whistle-stop history tour: Sistine Chapel 101, if you like. Meet Pope Sixtus IV, pope between 1471 and 1484:

It was Sixtus (adjective “Sistine” in case you need that mansplained) who commissioned the building of the chapel, which was completed in 1481 and has served ever since as the Pope’s official residence. Sixtus is also known for founding the Spanish Inquisition, but that’s another story, let’s stick with the chapel. He arranged for a team of painters (not Michelangelo yet — he comes later — but including two other famous names, Botticelli and Ghirlandiao) to create a series of frescoes on the walls, depicting the lives of Moses and Jesus.

Fast forward to 1508 and Pope Julius II is in charge (Julius was a relative of Sixtus: nepotism was another of Sixtus’s strong suits):

Julius commissioned Michelangelo to complete the decoration of the chapel by painting the ceiling, which he completed four years later in 1512. This was a project that changed the course of Western art and is rightly regarded as one of the crowning artistic accomplishments of human civilisation. Replete with biblical scenes, stories and characters, the ceiling is a riotous collection of limbs and draperies, at first glance, and indeed a photo of the ceiling doesn’t really do it justice — but given time to appreciate (whilst not bumping into fellow tourists), it is an artistic tour de force that warrants its fame. Click on these images to expand; the first to spot the Creation of Adam wins a prize…

Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime