Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at The British Library

PART ONE

The British Library exhibition Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination began, appropriately enough, with a descent. After a brief introductory film in which four explorers of diverse Gothic realms (Neil Gaiman, Sarah Waters, Ben Wheatley and Mark Daneilewski) outlined the shadowy territory we were about to stumble blindly into, we walked down a set of stairs and entered a gloomy, crypt-like space. The ‘rooms’ we passed through were separated by draped veils of funereal black which shivered in currents of a spectral wind with no evident point of origin (yes, it was the air conditioning, but let’s not break the mood here). Darkness prevailed. It was all is it should have been; as it was fated to have been.

Surrealist Gothic - Jan Svankmajer's The Castle of Otranto

The first room concerned itself almost exclusively with Horace Walpole, his antecedents, friends and those he went on to influence. He was portrayed as an origin figure for Gothic literature and its subsequent cultural offshoots. Most notably, this was due to his anonymous self-publication in 1764 of the novel The Castle of Otranto, which established many of the staples of Gothic fiction to come: the incursions of the supernatural, the medieval castle with its secret vaults, the revivification of buried histories and ancient curses, the menaced and imperilled heroine and the general air of barely suppressed hysteria. It may be a story seldom read today, but its influence can be felt through its still proliferating lineage. The Czech animator, filmmaker and artist Jan Svankmajer paid homage to it in his short 1979 condensation of the novel, which was shown in the upper entrance room. Period illustrations come to animated life as a book’s pages are riffled by an invisible hand. The framing device for the film has a historian and literary archaeologist claim to have discovered the real Castle of Otranto at Otrhany, near Nachod in the Czech Republic. It is this which Walpole used as the basis for his fictional locale, he claims. As well as suggesting a rediscovery of a half-forgotten text, it’s a clever way of having the Gothic world of imaginary derangement infect and invade what is presented as rational documentary realism. Svankmajer is a contemporary inheritor of the surrealist sensibility, and as such his co-option of the Castle of Otranto is an acknowledgement of the prominence of Walpole and the Gothic in general within the surrealist canon, its curated cabinet of curiosities. A 1765 edition of the novel was displayed in the exhibiton, with Walpole, safely assured of the novel’s success, identifying himself as the author. It now bears the subtitle ‘a Gothic story’. Thus the genre was coined.

The exhibition took care to point out Walpole’s own influences, making it evident that The Castle of Otranto didn’t appear magically formed from a pure and untrammelled imagination. Shakespeare’s ghosts and supernatural beings offer a clearly defined precedent (if such a description is apposite for such immaterial manifestations and half-glimpsed sprites). Walpole’s 1728 copy of The Merchant of Venice was included here, as was Henry Fuseli’s highly dramatic and very physical rendering of the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in a 1796 engraving. A 1529 edition of Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur and a 1617 edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene further outlined the appeal of antiquity and of a dream medievalism, a fantasy of the past replete with quests and allegorical stories, strange landscapes inhabited by demons and monsters waiting to devour souls which strayed from the righteous path.

Johann Muntz's print of Strawberry Hill

Walpole’s fashioning of his own private Gothic domain at Strawberry Hill on the winding banks of the Thames below Twickenham from 1747 onwards was an attempt at realising this fantasy world in solid, architectural form. He was thus the progenitor of Gothic revival architecture in addition to recasting it in a new literary form. Some of the original plans for the house’s elaborate Gothicisation were included, serving to emphasise its general air of studied artifice. It was pointed out the Walpole intended his home to be a showpiece from the outset, charging visitors for admission once it was completed. It was a series of theatrical sets which the imagination was prompted to fill with shadowy figures and strange happenings. The spirit of Strawberry Hill, the experience of inhabiting the living dream of a self-created Gothic fantasy, inspired the writing of The Castle of Otranto.

Chatterton by Henry Wallis (1856)

Walpole initially published the novel anonymously, claiming that it was a translation made by one William Marshal of a work originally written by an Italian with the florid name of Onuphrio Muralto and printed in 1529. This may partly have been a device designed to shield him from any adverse reaction to the story’s sensational aspects. But once more, Walpole set the trend for the literary work as ‘discovered’ manuscript. Included here were two of the best known 18th century forgeries: James Macpherson’s ‘translation’ of Fingal, an early Gaelic epic by an ancient poet known as Ossian; and the ‘discovery’ of a number of manuscripts by 15th century Bristolian poet Thomas Rowley by the teenage would-be poet Thomas Chatterton, best known today as an exquisite corpse in Henry Wallis’ Pre-Raphaelite painting of 1856. Chatterton’s doctored manuscripts were on display, pasted into a large scrapbook. The crude attempts to make them appear timeworn and antiquated, with brown staining liberally splashed across the vellum he acquired from the attorney’s office in which he worked, now appear charmingly amateurish. That people were prepared to accept them as genuine is testament to the 18th century intoxication with antiquity, the intense desire to commune with voices from the past.

Walpole's Becket Reliquary

Walpole found fulfilment of this desire through his dedicated antiquarianism. He collected objects from centuries past, both in England and on his journeys through Europe, and filled up every niche and corner of Strawberry Hill with his diverse finds. A particularly beautiful 13th century enamelled reliquary chest dedicated to Thomas Becket was included in the exhibition, housed in a glass cabinet in the middle of the room which enhanced its sacrosanct air. This was an object to be circled and gazed at from all angles, but not touched. A certain distance was maintained, as it would have been for pilgrims centuries ago. It must have been thrilling for Walpole to be able to pick it up whenever the fancy took him, to open the small, hinged lid and peer reverently inside, imagining what it once contained. Alongside the reliquary was a book by his friend George Vertue, a catalogue of the antiquities he drew up whilst staying at Strawberry Hill, opened to show the page on which a colour study of the adjacent object was printed.

John Dee's 'shew stone'

Most intriguing, however, was another artefact which Walpole owned, one which, whilst looking fairly unprepossessing, was imbued with great power and mystery. This was John Dee’s spirit mirror. On loan from the British Museum, it is a smooth, flat disc of polished obsidian, darkly and depthlessly reflective. The accompanying tooled leather case bears a handwritten label by Walpole indicating the nature of its content. Walpole bought the mirror in 1777, and it was used by Dee in the late 16th century. But it originally found its way over to Europe from what is now Mexico, part of the plunder of the Conquistadors in the 1520s and 30s. Dee was obviously aware of its provenance as a mirror for divination and conjuration used by the Mexica priests. Dee himself was a magician, mathmetician, alchemist, cartographer and court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth, all disciplines which were regarded as part of an undivided body of knowledge. A fascinating character, he has proved irresistible to a number of writers and artists, and appears prominently in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, John Crowley’s Aegypt sequence of novels, Alan Moore’s Promethea comics, Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr Dee, Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana and Gustav Meyrink’s The Angel of the West Window. Dee became acquainted with a young man called Edward Kelley, who claimed to commune with angels. Dee spent an increasing amount of his time attempting to make such a communication himself, with Kelley as intercessory bridge. The black reflecting mirror, or ‘shew stone’, was supposedly given to him by an angel and gave him access (via Kelley) to dimensions normally inaccessible to human vision. Whether or not you give any of this the slightest credence (and the question of whether the stone was ever in Dee’s possession is open to debate) there is a thrill in seeing this myth-infused occult object which such a fascinating historical figure firmly believed opened up higher planes of knowledge and existence, and allowed him to make contact with the beings who possessed and inhabited them.

Edward Young's Night Thoughts illustrated by William Blake

Walpole’s shared schooldays and later acquaintance with Thomas Gray also forges a connection between him and the so-called graveyard poets. This short-lived branch of English poetry, epitomised by Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742), gave expression to the morbid musings of young men who wandered around graveyards contemplating mortality, their own and others. The graveyard became the Gothic locus of a strange, inverted form of romanticism, pale, drawn and half in love with Death. The cold idyll of the graveyard, drained of bright colour save for the odd bunch of fading blooms and the red of the poisonous berries on the yew tree, would provide the trysting place for Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley. They would rendezvous by the grave of Mary’s mother in St Pancras churchyard. Neil Gaimain’s novel The Graveyard Book (which features later in the exhibition) also uses the graveyard as a romantic locale within the fenced and gated bounds of which the tale of a young boy’s growth to maturity takes place.

William Blake's Vala or The Four Zoaz

A 1797 edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts was illustrated by William Blake, who wrapped his angels, demons and tormented sleepers around a central pane containing the text. Pages of this book, which was only ever partially published, were on display here. It was a troubled commission, and only a fraction of the watercolours Blake produced as sketches for later engravings finished in final printed form. He retained many of the proofs which remained unused and began writing his own poem in the blank, squared-off spaces intended for Young’s words. The night journey undertaken by the figures he had drawn influenced the dark prophecies and troubled invective in Vala, or The Four Zoas, written shortly after the altercation with a soldier in the Sussex village of Felpham which had almost led to his trial for sedition. Never published in his lifetime, it was rediscovered in 1889, surfacing in a fin-de-siecle period the mood of which suited its intensely expressed visions of doom and apocalyptic fire. The pages exhibited here showed that the Gothic was capable of inspiring and encompassing extraordinary visionary height, and even more profound depths.

Fonthill Abbey - the ultimate Gothic folly

As the Gothic form developed, so it expanded to explore and colonise new areas, testing the boundaries of aesthetic, social and even physical tolerance by pursuing new extremes. There was an architectural model of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey on display which has long outlasted the extravagant fantasy for which it served as a template. Fonthill was designed to be the ultimate Gothic dwelling, leaving Strawberry Hill in its extensive shadow in terms of its scale and obsessive detail. It proved a hubristic structure, however, built without the accumulated knowledge of the medieval masons. The gargantuan spire, now a fairly obvious symbol of overweening male ego rather than a physical manifestation of heavenly aspiration, was from the beginning an unstable structure, which collapsed several times. Beckford eventually gave up on his expensive dream and built a structure which, perhaps in wry recognition of the true nature of Fonthill, resembled a folly; the tower which still raises its finger on the hills above Bath. Beckford’s novel Vathek (1786), a copy of which was on display in the exhibition, took the Gothic into the realms of the Arabian Nights fantasy. The ‘exoticism’ that this form afforded, its distance from the norms of Western civilisation and from familiar narratives and settings, allowed for new extremes of cruelty, violence and depravity. Naturally, the notoriety which ensued did nothing to harm the success of the book.

The exhibition notes made the observation that the levels of sex and violence in Gothic novels increased markedly in the wake of the French Revolution and the bloody Terror into which it descended in the 1790s. Matthew Lewis’ The Monk was the prime example offered here, which also throws in a good deal of anti-clericalism for good measure. The horrors of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation became another staple of Gothic fiction, memorably featuring in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (another subject of a Jan Svankmajer film). The figure of the depraved or pitiless monk, a terrifying cowled and faceless presence possessed of unassailable power and authority, took its place amongst the repertory of Gothic characters. The English Reformation cast a long shadow, and Catholic institutions and rituals could still be relied upon to elicit a shudder if cast in a suitably sinister light.

German Gothic novels, which drew on a rich heritage of folklore connected with mountains and dense forests, were renowned (or notorious) for being even more graphic than their English counterparts. They were briefly in fashion towards the end of the 18th century. In Jane Austen’s parody of Gothic literature, Northanger Abbey (1818), the heroine is offered a list of seven novels to read after she has finished Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents. Some are German, whilst others ape the Germanic style. They are all, however, perfectly ‘horrid’, she is assured. They have therefore come to be known as the Northanger Horrid Novels, and all turn out to have been real, published works. Austen evidently had in-depth knowledge of contemporary Gothic. Editions of these obscure works were laid open side-by-side in a central display cabinet so that we might glimpse something of their appalling nature. The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796), subtitled A German Tale (as the former may as well have been too) were both by the English novelist Eliza Parsons. The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath was another German tale written by an English writer, whilst Clermont (1798) was by the Irish writer Regina Maria Roche. The Midnight Bell (1798) by Dutch author Francis Latham not only claimed to be ‘A German Story’ in its subtitle, but also to be ‘Founded On Incidents in Real Life’. The final two novels were the genuine article, even if they claimed not to be. The Horrid Mysteries (1796), or ‘A Story From the German Of The Marquis Of Grosse’ was actually a translation of the novel Der Genius by Carl Grosse. The Necromancer or The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by Ludwig Flammenberg sounds particularly intriguing (and particularly German). Disappointingly, the splendidly named Flammenberg turns out to be another pseudonym, a florid mask for more mundanely monickered Carl Friedrich Kahlert.

Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare (1781)

Henry Fuseli was Swiss rather than German, and a long-term resident of the British Isles. There remained something Germanic about the fantastical, grotesque nature of much of his work, however. In 1781 he painted The Nightmare, a print of which was exhibited here. It remains one of the definitive images of the Gothic imagination, and was hugely popular at the time, reproduced in many subsequent engravings. The demonic imp crouching on the chest of the uncomfortably sprawled, restlessly sleeping woman and the marble-eyed, phantom horse materialising from the shadows have been the subject of much pastiche and parody over the years. This powerfully physical representation of a dream state is viewed with disturbing objectivity from a viewpoint exterior to the dreamer, as if these were real demonic beings inducing night terrors in the unknowing sleeper. The sideways stare of the homunculus, meeting the gaze of the picture’s viewer, makes it feel as if we have come across a scene we should not have borne witness to. It is a tableau of temporary suspension, full of the potential for sudden and very rapid subsequent action. The poster for Ken Russell’s 1986 film Gothic, his and writer Stephen Volk’s version of the events of that famously stormy night at the Villa Diodati (which we’ll come to in a moment), restages The Nightmare for a cinematic tableau.

Theodor von Holst's frontispiece illustration for an 1831 edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The Nightmare is a bridge into the Romantic era. The exhibition notes suggested that the Romantic artists largely diverged from Gothic themes. However, there were exceptions; manuscripts of Coleridge’s Christabel (a forerunner of Poe’s poetry) and Wordsworth’s The Vale of Esthwaite were included to show that they did sometimes descend into the shadows. And it was from the milieu of the Romantic movement that a work would emerge which would profoundly influence the direction which Gothic would take and form the ground from which new generic hybrids would sprout and flourish. Not the least of these would be science fiction, which Brian Aldiss defines, in Billion/Trillion Year Spree, as being ‘characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode’. The work in question is, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Included here was an 1831 edition with illustrations by Theodor von Holst. His depiction of the monster bears a resemblance to William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea. The title page print depicts with stark simplicity the horror Frankenstein feels towards his creation, and his abandonment of the bewildered newborn man, who sprawls like a loose-limbed puppet in the laboratory.

Shelley’s revised manuscript for the 1831 edition was on display, handwritten on blue paper. Also present was a letter written by Lord Byron, protesting that no impropriety had taken place during that storm-wracked evening at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva where he had played host to Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, his physician John Polidori and Clair Clairmont, his mistress of the moment. Given his reputation, and such protest was liable merely to stoke further salacious speculation, and he would probably have been better advised to hold his silence. That evening, Byron had been reading ghost stories aloud as the storm rumbled and flashed outside (and German ghost stories at that!) He also read lines from Coleridge’s Christabel, which sent the unhinged Shelley fleeing from the room with a wild shriek. The reading led on to the suggestion that everyone should write their own horror story to complement the fearsome atmosphere of the night beyond. This challenge, instantly mythologised by all parties present, resulted in the first outline of Frankenstein. Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), who had already lost a child of her own, and whose mother had died as a result of her own delivery into the world, came up with the idea of the blasphemous birth of a new, monstrous man through the generative, galvanic powers of science; powers which wholly excluded motherhood and female agency.

Frankenstein functions as a gateway into the world of modern Gothic, largely via the numerous cinematic variations which have evolved from the central idea. The clip of Bride of Frankenstein playing on a loop was really our first glimpse of Gothic as the major stylistic component of the horror genre as it developed in the twentieth century. Frankenstein’s creation evolved (or devolved) from the tormented haunter of the wilderness, the self-educated outsider abandoned by his father, into Boris Karloff’s innocent, shambling brute, both pitiful and terrifying. Frankenstein provides us with our first classic horror monster. The novel opens a nocturnal window onto the twentieth century, giving us a brief prospect of the encroaching shadows of Gothic horror whose tendrils would extend into every aspect of popular culture. There was a copy of the 1967 Brunswick LP An Evening With Boris Karloff and his Friends, contained soundtrack clips from the great Universal monster movies introduced by the now elderly actor. Also on display were some of Scott MacGregor’s set designs for the late Hammer film Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974). This served as a self-reflective and melancholic conclusion to the studio’s series of Frankenstein pictures, almost invariably starring Peter Cushing as a particularly amoral Doctor, which had been so central to their output. Along with the Dracula films, they were instrumental in building their reputation as purveyors of quality Gothic to the masses. MacGregor’s designs are sketches for a dream film which could no longer be realised with Hammer’s dwindling resources in the bleak years of the mid-70s. Interestingly, Frankenstein and his creation have been conspicuously absent from recent revivals and revisitations of the Gothic canon. The single shambling monster has been largely supplanted by hordes of shuffling, moaning zombies. Maybe it is time for the creature to rise from the slab once more.

Frankenstein was the progenitor of many literary forms and ideas. But it can also be seen as an endpoint in terms of ‘pure’ Gothic fiction, if indeed there is a beast of such pedigree. Its Romantic sensibility and use of landscapes giddy with sublime terror (alpine peaks and Arctic wildernesses) as exteriorised expressions of interior states mark it apart from the more generic Gothic novel. The spectres of 18th and early 19th century Gothic arose from the historical past (real or fabled). Frankenstein’s monster, on the other hand, is created through the application of scientific rationalism, Henry Frankenstein himself the modern Prometheus who fashion his own relentless Nemesis. And so, we leave the 18th and early 19th century Gothic rooms and pass through the doorway into the period which has surpassed them in terms of furnishing the modern imagination with its ‘classic’ Gothic props – the Victorian age. And naturally, the writer who ushers us into this fogbound, gaslit world is Charles Dickens.

British Art Up North - Leeds, Wakefield, Manchester and Birmingham

PART ONE

William Hogarth - The Distressed Poet

An ill-travelled Southerner, I recently headed up North to Leeds, Manchester and Wakefield, with a short subsequent jaunt to the Midlands and Birmingham (which is still North from here, anyroad). This gave me the opportunity to visit the local galleries and see the excellent collections of British art which they hold from the Victorian and early to mid-twentieth century periods, and come across works by favourite artists which I’d not encountered before in the sense of standing before the actual painting (an experience which no reproduction, no matter how expertly photographed and reproduced, can replace). The Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham museums and galleries are all housed in imposingly monumental buildings reflecting the sense of civic pride in these newly emergent cities of the industrial revolution. Given the neoclassical Victorian facades of all these buildings, it’s unsurprising to discover that they all have impressive collections of nineteenth century British art, with Manchester and Birmingham having particularly fine displays of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. There are works by earlier favourites, too: Hogarth, Blake and Samuel Palmer. The original oil painting of Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet (1733-5) in Birmingham, which was subsequently reproduced in several versions as a print, vividly portrays the poverty and despair of a Grub Street writer (the precursor of the modern day hack). Hogarth depicts his jobbing wordsmith as more exploited than exploitative. The garret room is unadorned and bare (as is the food cupboard) and the ceiling plaster is crumbling, exposing the joists beneath. The writer, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown sits at his desk, his chair the end of the bed, desperately rubbing his head beneath his wig as if to prompt the circulation of new ideas. The detritus of crumpled and discarded papers below indicates that they are refusing to emerge to order. Meanwhile, his wife sews his worn trousers and attempts to deal with the demands of the milkmaid, who proffers the full board of unpaid bills. Only the cat seems comfortable, curled up on the writer’s coat, which is cast down on the floor. His comfort may be shortlived, however, since it seems unlikely that he’ll be getting any more milk. It’s a scene which had a bitter personal resonance for Hogarth. His father, Richard, came down to London in the late 1680s, with dreams of becoming a writer and teacher, and settled in the Bartholomew Close in the Smithfield area, adjacent to Grub Street, where William was born. But he found the learned life to be a hard struggle, and failed to make a name for himself, his proposals for a dictionary and literary coffee house never realised. The only books for which he did find a publisher were a children’s introduction to Latin, Greek and English and a few school texts. The manuscript of the dictionary and encylopaedia, his grand work, was later lost. In 1709, when young William was 12 years old, he found himself in the Fleet debtor’s prison, where he remained until 1713. His incarceration would have been more extended had it not been for a new parliamentary bill offering relief for low-level debtors.

Samuel Palmer - The Bright Cloud

There were a couple of William Blake paintings in Manchester, delicately sculptural renderings in tempera of literary ‘heads’, busts of the Spanish poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga and the French enlightenment essayist Voltaire. Relatively conventional and lacking in his customary visceral visionary intensity, these date from around the year 1800, when he also submitted two biblical paintings in tempera (The Last Supper and The Loaves and Fishes) for exhibition at the Royal Academy. It would seem that this was a period in which he was making one last bid for artistic respectability. Blake’s follower Samuel Palmer has his painting The Bright Cloud (1833-4) in Manchester. It’s not the only picture he did with this title, and the billowing masses of cumulus cloud form a secondary landscape in the background. It’s one of his depictions of a golden and russet coloured autumnal idyll, a Kentish Eden in the Darenth Valley, where he lived in the village of Shoreham. The sleepily rural scene, with placid cattle idling on the hillside beneath oak and beech, is given a sacred resonance by the figures walking past, baskets on their heads presumably containing apples from an adjacent orchard. They are led by a figure in a blood-red headscarf (echoing the autumnal reds on the hill) on a donkey, who guides them in a processional line into the valley, like Christ riding into Jerusalem; the prelude to an English pastoral Passion.

Atkinson Grimshaw - Reflections on the Thames, Westminster (1880)

Leeds Art Gallery honours its native son, Atkinson Grimshaw (he was born in Back Park Street on 6th September 1836) with a number of his works from their extensive collection on display. Probably best known is his fairy painting Iris, which also acts as a study in autumnal colours and atmospheres. The titular fairy, hovering above a woodland pool with a certain aerodynamic implausibility, has a fiery halo forming a coronal crown about her head, the light from which reflects on the spectral translucence of her dragonfly wings, which in turn refract in beams and phosopherescent spatters of radiant light. This sprays out into the twilight shadows of the autumn woodland, bringing out and making hallucinatorily vivid their orange, red, caramel and mossy green colours. Iris was the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology, connecting heaven and earth, the divine and the human, and was associated with the rainbow, which similarly connected those realms. Here, Grimshaw brings the Greek goddess into a very English environment, linking the old Mediterranean myths with the more native fairy tale tradition, with its northern European roots. She becomes the spirit of autumn, highlighting the beauty of the season which Grimshaw would repeatedly depict to such atmospheric effect. Iris is, in effect, his muse. Grimshaw was also known for his nocturnes, evocations of nightime atmospheres, either in reflective, rain-slicked city streets or in tree lined suburban streets, with eerie, shadowy figures hovering in the middle distance. On display here was his London picture Reflections on the Thames, Westminster, in which the curve of the Embankment leads to Westminster Bridge, lit by doubled rows of gaslit lamps, and the clockface of Big Ben smoulders with a baleful orange glow. A woman looks longingly over the water, silvered by the full moon which shines through dappled cloud, thinking who knows what. Perhaps she is considering how inviting the waters look. Her dog looks at the oncoming night strollers, intent on protecting her from any unwanted attentions. The lunar light creates a moody green luminescence which is an instantly recognisable characteristic of Grimshaw’s nocturnes. His nights are always tinted with a copper-green patina. A small, late work from 1892-3 is also on display, Snow and Mist (Caprice in Yellow Minor). A departure from his signature style, the musically allusive title makes clear his debt to Whistler, his fellow nocturniste. Its snowbound landscape is featureless noplace, daringly stripped of recognisable landmarks or any sign of human habitation. The lady with a shawl carrying her small basket on her concealed arm is walking into a blank void. It’s a study in off-whites, approaching abstract colour composition in the manner of Turner. It’s a brave turn towards experiment, an exploration of new styles and techniques in what was to be the last year of his life. He died in the year of its completion, 1893, and was buried in Woodhouse Cemetery in Leeds.

Ford Madox Brown - Work (1852-65)

Ford Madox Brown’s Work, in Manchester, is one of the key works of Victorian art, in which the Pre-Raphaelite medieval dreaming or pious religiosity was set aside for a moment in order to represent the world around them as they saw it. Just as much of a dream, perhaps, but a fascinating insight into the Victorian mindset. And, thanks to the detailed photographic realism of the Pre-Raphaelite style, with its invisible brushstrokes, a real snapshot of Victorian life in all its colour and grime. The view is from the raised footpath above Heath Street in Hampstead, and is still recognisable today, although the road is now habitually choked with traffic heading up the hill towards the heath and over into Golders Green and points north, or down towards the centre of the ‘village’ and on through Archway into the dense heart of the city beyond. As usual with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the composition is cluttered with symbolic detail, every carefully placed object and figure freighted with some more or less obscure meaning. I find it best, having taken note of the different meanings, to ignore them and just enjoy the painting on its own pictorial merits. Here, Brown crams all the tiers of Victorian society within his small, overarching gold frame: the industrious navvies digging up the pavement; the well-dressed ladies leisurely taking the air; the marchers with their sandwich board surplices, perhaps advertising their temperance sentiments; the dishevelled, bare-footed flower-seller, miserable with poverty; and the unruly and unsupervised urchins in the foreground, antecedents of the ‘chavs’ of modern-day parlance (these maybe having a more direct linguistic correspondence, gypsies coming down from the fairs on the heath). Overlooking the whole teeming parade with a surveying stance of analytical detachment are portrait figures of the Reverend F.D.Maurice, a man of the cloth with a bent for social reform, and the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle. With their air of casual repose, they represent a less physically arduous kind of work, the labour of the mind. They stand in for the observer of the picture, implicitly inviting a unifying overview which draws all the elements together into a socially representative whole. Carlyle was a difficult model, too impatient and restless to stand still long enough for his portrait to be accurately painted. His likeness was instead worked up from a photograph, the new medium which allowed for a realistic reproduction of nature to be created within the comfortable confines of the studio.

John Everett Millais - Autumn Leaves (1856)

Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd, also in Manchester, is another of the best-known of Pre-Raphaelite works. This moves out of the city to a more characteristic rural and, in this case, agricultural setting. Again, the symbolism, with straying sheep and tempting apples, can be comfortably ignored, leaving us with an enjoyable portrayal of rosy-cheeked rustic lust against a beautifully realised farmland backdrop, one part pasture, one part golden-sheaved arable. This background is painted with the meticulous Pre-Raphaelite attention to the detail of the natural world, to the shape, texture and colour gradations of leaf, grass-blade and corn-stalk. Such attention to natural form can also be found in Arthur Hughes’ 1859 painting The Long Engagement, in which fern and ivy, tree-bark and moss are rendered with such exquisite care that you can almost smell the loamy woodland aroma. They draw the attention as much as the trysting figures chastely meeting behind the tree trunk. John Millais’ Autumn Leaves, in Manchester, is a more evanescent evocation of nature, a beautiful depiction of twilight gloaming. Its warm, after-sunset colours contrast with encroaching shadow in what amounts to an autumnal English impressionism, catching the quality of evening light. A few curls of smoke send exploratory tendrils into the frame from the left, and the painting exudes a taint of smoky atmosphere from neighbouring bonfires and chimneys, synaesthetically extending its sensory range beyond the visual to the olfactory. The pile of dead leaves raked up by the young girls, their cheeks rosy with the cold and faces aglow with the light from the implied bonfire placed beyond the frame, about where the viewer is standing, at which they stare, are clearly intended to reflect the seasons of life, foretelling their own inevitable aging. I prefer once more to put such sentimental and overstuffed Victorian symbolism to one side and revel in the melancholic glow of this magical autumn evening.

John William Waterhouse - The Lady of Shallott (1894)

John William Waterhouse’s Lady of Shallott, in Leeds, represents the wistfully yearning Arthurian dreaming of the Pre-Raphaelites, mainly (as in this case) deriving from Tennyson. Here, the lady, forever isolated in her river island tower, weaves the threads of her own binding fate, not yet aware of the figure of Lancelot riding across the meadow beyond. The same subject was painted by William Holman Hunt, a picture I first came across on the cover of the post-New Worlds SF and fantasy anthology the Savoy Book, published out by the Manchester Savoy Press in 1978. It was his last work, completed with the help of Edward Robert Hughes in 1905, and now resides in the suitably castellated building of the Wadsworth Athenium in Connecticut. Waterhouse’s smaller painting is not to be confused with his much-loved, large scale work entitled The Lady of Shallott, which happened to be on display in Birmingham at this time as part of an exhibition of Victorian paintings on loan from the Tate, entitled Love and Death. This transports us to the final stages of Tennyson’s poem, with the lady leaving her protecting tower to float downstream towards Camelot. It’s a journey which fulfils her foretold fate, her mysterious, funereal arrival at the castle presaging the fall of Arthur’s court. The frail, fey figure of the Lady reveals, as did Millais’ Ophelia, the Victorian gentleman’s tendency to view women as fragile creatures in need of sheltering and protection, and their attraction to tragic and mournfully sentimental presentations of femininity. The popularity of the Pre-Raphaelites in the late 60s and 70, particularly in their Arthurian mode, also made Waterhouse’s Lady the model for many a wispy flower child or myth-soaked folkie.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Proserpine (1874)

The decadent phase of late Victorian art, as embodied by Aesthetics like Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Whistler, favoured a more openly sensual approach, full-bloodedly seductive or exquisitely refined, and pious religiosity or finickety symbolism tended to get left behind. There are a number of Rossetti paintings in the museums, as well as Holman Hunt’s memorial portrait of his friend, painted in 1882 from an 1853 sketch. It captures him as a wide-eyed 22 year old romantic, a remembrance of better days. Beata Beatrix, in Birmingham, posthumously casts Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal as Dante’s dead love. The poppy which the descending dove brings to her in its beak, as well as the ecstatic, dreamily self-absorbed look on her face, alludes to Lizzie’s laudanum habit and the overdose from which she died. It’s a portrait of someone who had already effectively left him before she died. This particular painting was one of five copies he made of the composition, and Ford Maddox Brown took it upon himself to complete it in as close an approximation of his friend’s style as he could manage. Bower Meadow, in Manchester, is a more Pre-Raphaelite style watercolour, with fey, dreamy women gazing into some unspecified distance, possibly an interior one. They pluck absently on their instruments, producing what we can imagine as suspended, Debussyesque melodies, to which their doubles turn floating steps in each other’s arms in the middle distance. Unusually for Rossetti, there is also a tree-lined landscape in the background, like something from a medieval tapestry. This was taken from sketches he made at Knole Park near Sevenoaks some 22 years earlier. The woman on the right, with the copper hair and full features, is Alexa Wilding, one of the women Rossetti picked up from the streets to use as a model. She featured in a great many of his paintings from the mid-1860s onwards, although her presence tends to be overshadowed by that of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris, given the fact that she led a fairly self-contained and respectable life and had little to do with the tangled romantic lives of Rossetti and his circle. La Donna della Fiesta, in Birmingham, which dates from 1881 (the year preceding his death), and Proserpine (a variant name for Persephone, hence her biting into a pomegranate) are two of his later sensual portraits of mythological sirens which use Jane Morris as the model. Janey was the great love and muse of his life after Siddal had died. It was a love which was complicated by the fact that she was married to his friend and sometime artistic collaborator William Morris. Rossetti, perhaps more beholden to the mores of the time than he would have liked to admit, and undoubtedly sensitive to Jane and William’s feelings, kept the affair within the bounds of passionate friendship, although their relationship seemed to many to be closer than that between husband and wife. Rossetti’s feelings for her come through in the paintings, and in the roles in which he casts her. In his artistic renditions of her, he enjoyed dressing her up in theatrical finery, and imaginatively changing her appearance. In some versions of La Donna he dies her black hair golden, and in the Proserpine on display in Birmingham in the Love and Death exhibition it becomes auburn.

Frederick Sandys - Morgan le Fay (1862-3)

Like Rossetti with Alexa Wilding and later Fanny Cornforth (and to a degree Jane Morris, whom he first saw in a theatre box when she was still Jane Burden and then bumped into again in the streets of Oxford), Frederick Sandys cast a model from the streets, gypsy called Keomi, who took on the dramatic role of Morgan-le-Fay in his 1862-3 painting, in Birmingham. The sorceress’ room is imagined with a fantastic richness of detail, from the jewelled safe box with its phial and scroll in the bottom left and the coloured wool discarded on the floor, to the loom, which doubles as an owl perch, the flaming crucible and the straw scattered on the grain of the wooden floorboards. There is a similarly heady mix of textiles in different colours, with Morgan draped in folds of green, yellow and purple, a black cloak with colourful Celtic symbols hanging on the wall, and a red, green and gold tapestry covering the back wall. This Morgan is evidently very well-travelled: she wears a leopard-hide tied about her waist, holds what looks like some Assyrian relic, has a statue of the Buddha on her safe box, and a book at her feet with a painting of an Egyptian figure, as well as depictions of the Egyptian gods Bes, Horus, Set and Ra on her large tapestry wall covering. There’s a tiny landscape seen through the small window in the upper right hand corner, through the threads on the loom, the burnished after sunset colours of the sky reflected in a curve of river, suggesting that this is a room high up in a castle tower (a hidden corner of Camelot, perhaps).

Simeon Solomon - A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867-8)

Simeon Solomon, several of whose paintings are in the Birmingham collection, offered a more homoerotic perspective on Aesthetic sensuality. His paintings A Deacon (1863), A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867-8) and The Child Jeremiah (1862, privately owned but on display here) present beautiful young men dressed in fine garments, posed holding various sacramental objects within provocatively religiose compositions. The young Jeremiah has his lyre slung casually over his shoulder, an ancient Hebraic Dylan, whilst the deacon and saint hold their urns, censers and blossoming branches with an absent looseness, their inward gaze indicating that their attention is directed elsewhere. They are the kind of sexy priests, saints and prophets who might appear in the knowingly kitsch and romantically decadent photographic tableaux of Pierre et Gilles. Solomon was a friend of Rossetti and a member of his artistic circle (being particularly close with the poet Algernon Swinburne). Most of these friends and acquaintances moved to distance themselves from him after he was arrested in 1873 for picking up men in a toilet just off Oxford Street. One of the few who stood up for him was Edward Burne-Jones, on the surface a more sober and ‘respectable’ man, with none of Rossetti or Swinburne’s wildness, whose acceptance of a baronetcy towards the end of his life seemed to seal his establishment status.

Edward Burne-Jones - Star of Bethlehem (1885-90)

Burne-Jones has a whole room dedicated to his work in the Birmingham Art Gallery, an acknowledgement of his birth (in 1855) in nearby Bennetts Hill in what is now the centre of the city. The huge annunciation painting Star of Bethlehem was indeed commissioned by the Corporation of Birmingham late in Burne-Jones’s life, in 1889, its impressive yardage presumably a badge of profligate prestige. It was a copy, in watercolours, of a tapestry which he’d designed for Exeter College, Oxford in 1887, the fact that he was being asked at this stage to make copies of pre-existing works an indication of his well-established popularity and fame. Greybearded Joseph, standing just outside the stable, little more than a straw-roofed rain shelter held up by silver birch trunks, looks more like a druid than a carpenter in his blue-grey robes with a bundle of twigs under his arm and an axe at his foot. Mary sits on straw in her bower, whose wicker walls are threaded through with wild roses, contrasting with the blue speedwell and white celandine dotting the lush green grass beyond. They are quite the match for the jewels in the crown laid at the feet of one of the three kings who have just arrived. The angel who greets them, and who nurtures a warm glowing globe of light within its prayerfully uplifted hands, hovers just above the earth, indicating its separateness from the mortal realm. Its downturned feet are perfectly posed to show off the glittering straps of its golden sandals, and it casts a radiant shadow on the rush-bordered puddle beneath its weightless form. The African king seems to have a robe brought directly from Morris and Co, with Burne-Jones designs along the bottom hem. The dark shadows of the wildwood on the hills beyond the gathered group locate this scene more in the northern lands of Grimm fairy tales than in Biblical times and climates. It’s of a piece with Burne-Jones’ Arthurian paintings, part of a continuum with his mythological dreamworlds. Also in the room are large scale cartoons of The Last Judgement, created as models for stained glass windows produced by Morris and Co. for Easthampstead church in Berkshire from 1874-80. Working as murals in their own right, they indicate how prolifically hard-working Burne-Jones was, here effectively doubling the effort of creation to produce the finished glass-work. A late portrait of 1893-5 of Lady Windsor finds him painting in an uncharacteristically Whistler-like style. It is as much a subdued study in greys as it is a society portrait, and might as well have been given one of Whistler’s musical titles. The fact that he was, at this point in his career, sought after to paint society portraits, even though it was hardly what he was known for, indicates the degree to which Burne-Jones had been embraced by the art-loving establishment. His upwardly mobile drift, whilst it was not something he ever actively pursued, put a strain on his long term and very close friendship with William Morris, who was at the same time moving in the opposite direction, towards radical socialist engagement.

Walter Crane - At Home: A Portrait (1872)

Walter Crane was another artist, illustrator and designer working in the Arts and Crafts style who embraced socialist ideals, having initially been influenced in this direction by William Morris. This is not something you’d readily detect from his 1872 picture of domestic calm At Home: A Portrait, which is in the Leeds Gallery. This is an immaculate assemblage of Aesthetic interior furnishings: there’s the blue and white china vase; blue and white fireplace tiles, illustrated with various unusual creatures, including bats, salamanders and dolphins; a Rossetti style medievalist Pre-Raphaelite wall tapestry; a decorative blue and green carpet; and a Japanese fan neglectfully held between the thumb and forefinger of a woman in a state of easeful repose. This is Crane’s wife Mary, to whom he was devotedly married for 44 years, before she was tragically killed by a train in December 1914. Here, she is more modestly dressed than most Aesthetic models, the typical loosely draped garments restricted to a white shawl falling from her shoulders. She doesn’t have the enervated slump found in many Aesthetic portraits of women, too. Instead, she leans lightly on the mantelpiece and intently reads the book she is holding. Its covers are yellow, but it’s a little too early for it to be the Yellow Book, not quite close enough to the fin de siecle. A tabby sits regally by the fire, warming its back against the crackling flames. The relaxed presence of Mrs Crane and cat (the obvious choice of pet for an Aesthetic, Rossetti’s wombats aside) make this a genuinely homely scene, rather than just an ostentatious display of exquisite taste. It’s a portrayal of quiet beauty and intelligence, a record of the artist’s own love for his wife.

Gwen John - Interior (1915-16)

Gwen John was the master of contemplative domestic interiors with calm female subjects in the early 20th century. There were several of her sensitive portraits in the galleries, all displaying the subdued use of clay-like colours, thinly applied to give the pictures the look of roughly fired earthenware pottery. The bloom in Woman Holding A Flower adds a drop of red at the bottom of the frame to the palette. The woman herself has a sad and inward look which fails to reflect this intrusion of primary colour, however. The flower is drooping in her hand, and already wilting memory, perhaps echoing the melancholic turn of her thoughts. It may have been a variant of the expressions she wore whilst modelling for August Rodin, who was also her lover at this time, but who never returned her love with the same intensity of feeling which she exhibited. The model for the Woman Holding A Flower was Chloe Boughton-Leigh, with whom John became friends in 1907, and for whom she also sat as a model. The Convalescent, in Manchester, is one of her pictures of women reading, making it a good follow-up to the Walter Crane portrait. John’s reading women, like Crane’s wife in At Home, are a study in calm, concentrated repose as they focus in on the page, and on the inward thoughts which it promotes. Here, it is a letter rather than a book which the young woman reads as she sits in her wicker chair, back propped up on a pillow and loosely clenched hand resting in her lap. The overall pallor of the background and the furniture make the teapot, highlighted with glints of reflected light, stand out with preternatural clarity, as if it contained the medicinal stuff of life (as well it might). In another such portrait, The Student, also in Manchester, John’s friend Dorelia McNeil is posed in a standing position, looking down at a well-thumbed French paperback book, La Russie (a Russian dictionary?), a notebook grasped in one hand, the other leaning on the back of a simple chair. Her face is lit by a lamp somewhere beyond the frame, and she casts a shadow on the wall behind her in what is clearly, from the proximity of the ceiling above her head, a very modestly proportioned room. The glow cast on her face could easily be seen in symbolic terms, the radiance emanating from an active and intellectually engaged mind. McNeil, who was later to have an affair with Gwen’s more extrovert and licentious brother Augustus, was a junior secretary in a solicitors office. A woman from a humble background, she nevertheless had a passion for art, and went to evening classes at the Westminster School of Art. She had a winning personality, and was soon frequenting artistic circles, where she met and became friends with Gwen. They set out in 1903 on a spontaneously arranged and barely planned continental adventure, their intention to walk from Bordeaux to Rome. In the end, they got distracted and diverted along the way, and the journey was re-routed to take them eventually to Paris. John was to make her home there for many years, too many of them spent in the vain hope that Rodin, now an elderly man, might return her romantic feelings. Interior, in Manchester, depicts her room in the Rue Terre Neuve in Meudon, just outside Paris. Like the similar A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, it is haunted by her absence, a depiction of a space from which she has vanished, leaving behind strangely affecting everyday artefacts betokening recent presence. A set of tea cups and accessories and another brown teapot, standing out with talismanic solidity against the spectrally pale backround – perhaps still warm.

Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

PART TWO


Tiepolo’s Two Magicians and Two Boys (1740), taken from his Scherzi series of engravings, is a delicately outlined fantasy in which he explores a world of superstition, deviltry and primitive magic which is quite removed from the extravagant and grandiose baroque concoctions of his paintings and frescoes. This was one of the prints which inspired Brian Aldiss to write his fine baroque fantasy The Malacia Tapestry, which is set in a city state suspended in a glittering bubble of changeless time. Some of Tiepolo’s prints are reproduced in its pages, although not very well in the copy I have. A science fiction paperback isn’t really the ideal medium for fine art reproductions, I suppose. Aldiss writes of his fascination for Tiepolo’s late etchings, and their central mystery, in his autobiography The Twinkling of an Eye. ‘Even Italian scholars seem puzzled by what the great Gianbattista Tiepolo intended by the delicate Cappricci and Scherzi etched towards the end of his life’, he writes. ‘They depict a world of magic played out in dusty sunshine, shaded by stricken pines, where serpents burn on altars dedicated to unknown gods. I tried to re-create Tiepolo’s mysterious place in prose’. In Two Magicians and Two Boys, the two elderly, bearded and toothless magi perch upon what may well be a sarcophagus, wicked smiles upon their wrinkled faces. One leans on his semi-caduceus, the single coiled snake of which appears alarmingly lifelike. The other cradles a cracked urn, which is emitting some foul, dark vapour. They both look towards a young boy who is heaving a huge, slab-like tome over for them. Another boy lounges on the ground, his elbow resting on a human skull. The old man is writing something on a rock with his bare finger. The slaughtered sheep lying at his feet suggest that his ink may be blood, which is perhaps what fills his urn and gives off such sickening fumes. The seated boy looks up at the beginnings of his script with nervous alarm, as if he is just waking up after dozing off in the somnolent afternoon air. The boys would seem to be pupils or apprentices of the old men, but the look on their teachers’ faces suggests that what they are about to learn will not be to their benefit, and may not bode well for their future prospects. Hungry old age is plotting against trusty and respectful youth. Behind this diabolical classroom scene, a studious, goatheaded satyr bends over his books, a cloven hoof guiding his eyes along the lines of text. He may be required in a ceremony soon to be enacted, but meanwhile, he’s getting his horned head down and trying to better himself. All around them, the crumbling walls of the catacombs and sarcophagi rise, and architecture of ruin and death.

The museum’s first edition copy of Goya’s Los Caprichos (1799) is laid open at one plate depicting a gathering of old crones. Caprichos is the Spanish for caprices, playful fancies, although Goya’s fancies can be very dark indeed – humour at its blackest. Fancy here is aligned with fantasy, with the free exercise of the imagination. Tiepolo also made a series of Capricii etchings at about the same time as his Scherzi, which also featured magicians and demonic satyrs. Goya’s focus is more on witchcraft and the superstitious beliefs and terrors which still surrounded it in the Spain of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There seems to be something about the print form which makes it particularly open to the creation of fantastic and grotesque forms. The variable shades of black and white lend themselves to the nightside of human fears and dark fancies, to conjuring beasts and bogies from the inky blackness. Goya’s Caprichos use this quality of the black and white print to satirise human folly, superstition and gullibility, as well as the exploitation of power and influence. The famous plate The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters stands as a manifesto for the ethos of the series as a whole, with its dozing writer at his desk beset by swarms of monstrous bats, owls and cats. Reason and sense must stand against demons from the nightside of the mind, as well as against folly and abusive power. The plates of the Caprichos range widely in subject matter, mercilessly dissecting power, marriage, sex, education (in a series featuring anthropomorphised asses), class, old age and youth, and the clergy. They each have their own tersely sardonic title, along with wry accompanying commentaries. But about a quarter of the prints in the Caprichos centre around witchcraft. As Robert Hughes points out in his book on Goya, the fact that so many of the plates represent ‘witches at work and, so to speak, at play does not necessarily mean that Goya was a true believer in witchcraft. But it does imply that he knew very well what power the image of the witch had over the Spanish imagination in his time’. Goya’s often horrific images of witchcraft in practice are certainly not intended as documentation of real practices, but more as a mockery of superstition and the fear and sublimated desire which drives it, and an exaggerated look at the currents of power and influence which exist within human relationships. They are also, as the title suggests, a vehicle for the free play of the darker side of the human imagination.

Obsequio al maestro (‘Homage to the Master’), the plate on display here, depicts a coven of crones gathered around a central figure, who by implication is their leader. She grasps a tiny baby in her gnarled and bony fingers, which is as stiff and straight as an iced lolly, and she looks on it with a slack-lipped hunger which clearly indicates that she intends to eat it. The faces of the women around her run the gamut of human emotions, from hatred, greed and self-pitying sorrow to obsequiousness, dopey indifference and feigned aloofness. The element of horror is almost secondary to this study of human hierarchies. As Robert Hughes points out, there is also an element of clerical satire here, with ‘the supplicant’s gesture (reminding) one of a grovelling postulant kissing the cardinal’s ring’. The commentary runs ‘this is quite fair, they would be ungrateful disciples who failed to visit their professor, to whom they owe everything they know about their diabolical faculties’. Goya had to be careful and discreetly indirect when it came to satirising the church however. The Inquisition may have been relatively dormant at this time, but it was still perfectly capable of re-awakening and meting out terrible punishments at the dictates of circumstance or caprice. There are several Inquisition prints in the Caprichos, which emphasise the pitiful humiliations suffered by its victims, with their corozas, or dunce’s caps, perched on their heads and mocking crowds looking on. One of them, plate 24 ‘There was no remedy’, shows a woman whom we can assume has been convicted of witchraft, being led on an ass to her execution, the mob braying and cheering around her. Her look of weary exhaustion and despair is very far from the gleefully wicked women which the fevered imaginings of a hidden female world of witchcraft and secret sorcery conjure up. Goya would later produce an Inquisition Album, with plates detailing some of its tortures and punishments, still one of the most powerful indictments of the spiritual sickness of repressive totalitarian power. This, rather than the imaginary rituals and magical practices of witches, is where the true horror lies.

Open next to the Caprichos is one of the French Symbolist artist Odilon Redon’s books of lithographs, La Nuit (1886). Redon had been producing these collections of nightside images since Dans le Reve (In the Dream) in 1879, a title which could aptly be applied to all of them. They preoccupied him for much of the 1880s, and their dark charcoal shadows contrast strikingly with the intensely coloured pastels of his later years. He was clearly influenced by Goya’s Caprichos and others of the Spanish master’s prints, and inspiration which he made explicit in the title of his 1885 collection Homage a Goya. He also provided allusive and suggestive titles for his often ambiguously strange images, with further poetic commentaries alongside (Redon was always a very literary artist). He was, together with Gustave Moreau, the quintessential artist as far as des Esseintes, the protagonist of JK Huysman’s novel A Rebours (Against Nature), was concerned. Des Esseintes himself was a character who provided an immaculate model of Decadent tastes for many, and the popularity of the novel elevated Redon into the fin de siecle aesthete’s canon. Huysmans, in detailing the various rooms in des Esseintes exquisitely appointed house, comes to ‘the vestibule...(in which) other prints, other weird drawings hung in rows along the walls’. Those which he stood in front of most frequently ‘were all signed Odilon Redon’. Having detailed the strange nature of these prints, he concludes that ‘these drawings defied classification, most of them exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium’. The lithograph on display here, La Chimere Regarda Avec Affroi Toutes Choses (The Chimera Gazed At All Things With Fear), shows what appears to be an undersea creature, with curled and coiling seahorse tail, spiny-ridged back, and fan like fins. A large, semi-human head sits awkwardly on top of the serpentine body, huge, finned ears, large staring eyes and a flat, bull-like nose giving it an appearance both gawky and strange. Its massive pupils seem accustomed to darkness, and it stares into the near distance with wide-eyed, nervy alertness. It is like a clumsily grafted specimen in a Victorian cabinet of curiosities come to life, the look of startlement and anxiety on its face perhaps reflecting a permanent state of astonishment and vague revulsion at its own unlikely existence. Whilst it looks like it should scull its way through the obscure waters of some lost Sargasso Sea, the tenebrous, crosshatched background from which it emerges has nothing of the oceanic about it. Rather than floating in a liquid medium, it seems that, despite lacking any aerodynamic qualities, this creature is hovering and squirming in mid-air. This is no doubt the sort of thing which des Esseintes observes ‘seemed to be borrowed from the nightmares of science, to go back to prehistoric times’.

I was particularly excited to find a copy of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) on display, open at page 4, the plate headed The Voice of the Devil. It opens with the lines ‘All Bibles as sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors’. Considering that this was published in the same decade as Goya’s Caprichos leads us to realise the wide gulf between the England and Spain at the time. Goya wouldn’t have dared to make such a boldly heretical statement, which would soon have led to the Inquisition knocking at his door. Blake’s book offers the first examples in the exhibition of prints inked in washes of colour. Here, the intense elemental tones of red flame, sunset orange sky and blue ocean are rendered in watercolours give rich, burning texture by the acid etching and pressing processes. The sky shimmers with heat and the flames flicker outwards and upwards with almost palpable motion. The image of the chained devil reaching out from its cradle of fire towards the child, held firmly in the arms of an angel which treads lightly and swiftly over the waters is familiar from a later, full-page Blake print produced separately from any of the illuminated books: The Good and Evil Angels Struggling for Possession of a Child, a copy of which is owned by the Tate Gallery (although it’s not currently on display). It also forms the cover of Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Blake. The lettering of the text which takes up the bulk of the Voice of the Devil page is printed in gold, as if burnt in lines of liquid light. In between, hieroglyphic stick figures gather and move, as if the words themselves are coming to vibrant life. Some fly, some huddle in intense conversation. One walks a dog, another rides a chariot, one walks with a stick, another runs in desperate pursuit of someone or something, arms imploringly outstretched. The ‘l’ of the world life sprouts into a sinuous stem from which a figure is diving. The endpoint of the ‘e’ in age extends itself and forms an ear of wheat towards which a grasshopper springs. The ‘d’ in sacred shoots and sprouts two small leaves, language as a cutting propagating new life. The top of the page is washed in pale sky blue, with further word growth of spiralling vine and curling leaf providing foliate decoration which brackets the title (The Voice of the Devil), which is trumpeted by two angelic heralds. Language itself is given artistic shape, words formed with expressive visual flair, the ideas and mental pictures they embody flourishing before our eyes .This page elucidates one of the central ideas of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: that the body and soul are not separate, and that ‘energy’ (or instinct and vision) and reason are similarly not divided. Energy is often mistake for Evil in Blake’s mythology, and is the characteristic of the Devil (later embodied in the figure of Los in his personal pantheon), the figure reaching out from the flames which emanate from its shackled form. Perhaps the child might be better off if it were able to reach it. All of these qualities and states (body and soul, energy and reason) are inherent in the physical nature of being, which Blake celebrates in the teeming life of his words. The overflowing imagination of this and other plates give visual form to the summary lines of The Voice of the Devil: ‘energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight’. Blake is most definitely of the Devil’s part.

Whistler’s The Doorway (1879-80) is one of a number of etchings he produced in Venice after his ignominious and penurious retreat from England in the wake of the debacle of his libel trial against John Ruskin (the ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ affair). He’d technically (and possibly morally) won the case, but given the derisory nature of the compensation offered and the crippling legal costs he had to bear, it was something of a Pyrrhic victory. He returned to London to exhibit 12 of his Venice etchings in December 1880 at the Arts Society. The sepia print here depicts an open doorway through which we glimpse a dim, shady interior. A woman stands at the threshold and peers sleepily down at the water. The scene has a blurry early morning or lazy afternoon feel, languid and drowsy. The roundly arched windows on either side are intricately patterned with diamond panes, and the broad, semi-circular fanlight is gridded in a manner which makes it look like a portcullis. The dimly perceived interior is transformed in the reflective surface of the amorphous waters into a black, thumbprint smudge. The way in which the doorway opens directly, via a couple of shallow, slab-like steps, onto the liquid streets of the canal sums up the strange, fantastic atmosphere of the city state. Whistler was renowned (or infamous) for his semi-abstract nocturnes blurrily depicting London riverside scenes. He’d also made etchings and paintings of Thameside views from his rooms in Wapping way back in 1859, when he first came to London, and his ‘Thames Set’ of prints was published in 1871, at around the same time that he started painting his watery nocturnes. He was clearly drawn to urban waterside scenes. There was something about the reflection of artificial light in water, perhaps, or the liquid diffusion and diffraction of solid form and definite shape in its surface which allowed him to concentrate on the colour harmonies which he favoured above other compositional elements.

Max Klinger was a German artist who is best known for a sequence of etchings titled Paraphrase on the Discovery of a Glove (1881). This semi-narrative progression anticipates the surrealist collage stories of Max Ernst. It details the travails of the elegant evening glove, which strays from one strange setting to another, with a steadily escalating element of the absurd and the weird pervading them all. It is initially picked up by a gentleman on a roller skating rink circled by people in neat formal dress, fished out of a raging sea by a figure in a one-man sailing boat, taken for a ride over the waves in a seashell chariot pulled by cresting horses, placed on a pedestal table in a room curtained with its draped brethren from behind which the snout of a crocodile prods out, eying it beadily, stolen by a pterodactyl, and contemplated by a fairy which could easily fit inside its now crumpled and creased interior. The print on display here is equally playful and strange. Bear and Fairy (1881) depicts a teasing spright perching in the flimsy upper branches of a tree. It tickles the bear who clings on below it with a long, leaf-tipped stem. The bear can go no higher, having reached the last branch which will carry its weight. But the fairy goads it onward, hoping that it will continue climbing, providing the amusing spectacle of an ignominious, panicked crash and fall. Far below them, a long, sandy beach gently curves, mountains rising behind it, suggesting that we are on a tropical island. It’s a vertiginous perspective, and a long, long way to plummet.

Edvard Munch’s Desire (Begier) of 1898 is a black and white print which is more black than white. From the pervading darkness emerges the head of a woman, her hair spread out around her, suggesting that she is floating on the surface of a body of water, or on some depthless void. She resembles the demiurge Urizen in William Blake’s Book of Urizen, staring lifelessly upward with his beard floating out around him upon the formless waters. She may be drifting, or she may be drowning. Her expression suggests a state of lifeless anomie and blank dissociation. Above her float the semi-transparent visages of three men who look down on her voyeuristically, their faces full of the furtive, guilty desire familiar in Munch’s male figures. Moving into the twentieth century, Picasso’s Blind Minotaur Led By A Little Girl In The Night (1934) is part of his Vollard Suite, a series of prints he produced after his relationship with the young Marie-Therese Walter came out into the open, following the break-up of his marriage to Olga Koklova. They were named after the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned them, and who had supported Picasso since way back in 1901, when he was still an anonymous, impoverished Spanish artist in Paris. Many of the series were line drawings, unshaded outline pictures. Many were of an erotic nature, reflecting the energy his new relationship had filled him with, and he cast himself as the figure of the Minotaur. The print on display here is different from these, however, being an aquatint, a black and white ink and watercolour picture with the slightly old-fashioned look of a mezzotint. The immensely powerful Minotaur, all bulging muscle, broad shoulders and bullish neck, is being guided along the shore by the young girl, one hand upon her shoulder, the other grasping a staff with which it probes the ground ahead. The girl, her face turned around towards the Minotaur and seen in flat profile (with a prominent, high-bridged nose) holds a white dove in her arms, symbolising her innocence and purity. She is framed between the Minotaur’s torso, his upraised arm and his staff. He could easily crush and devour her, but there is a relationship of trust here. He needs her to lead him, and she is protected within that frame of flesh and staff. Around them, sailors lounge languorously about, looking on with worldly indifference. The stars above are hazy blurs of light, and the Minotaur seems to raising his head to bray up at them. There’s something a little Cocteau-esque about the picture, both in its representation of classical archetypes in boldly outlined form, and in its expression of a personal mythology.

So, from Durer to Picasso, from Nemesis and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the Minotaur and a small girl with a dove. There’s certainly no lack of variety in the range of prints on display here, but the element of mythology and the fantastic seems to be a consistent underlying thread throughout. There are many more in addition to those which I’ve focussed on, too. The exhibition runs in the Charrington Print Room until 7th October 2012, and the Edgelands exhibition (see part one) in the Shiba Room until 23rd September 2012.

The Romantics at Tate Britain

Part Two - Inward Vision

William Blake - A Vision: The Inspiration of the Poet

Romanticism favoured the individual artist, attributing to them the power to see the world in a fresh and entirely unique fashion, to perceive the elemental nature which lay underneath surface appearances. They conveyed such insights in their own particular manner, which owed little or nothing to prevailing academic tastes and standards. The expression of subjective vision, rather than the mastery of an accepted style, was at the heart of Romanticism in the visual arts. The artist was now deemed to possess a special nature which set them apart from the common horde. Whether this was innate, cultivated or stoked aflame through artificial stimuli (opium being the chosen key to fevered dreams favoured by Coleridge and Thomas de Quincy), it left the mind open to dimensions beyond those readily perceptible to the senses. The imagination was all-important. Coleridge held it to be ‘the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception…A repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.

The Romantics sought inspiration in nature, particularly in its wilder and more overwhelming forms (as mentioned in part one). This was partly an attempt to distance themselves from the ordered boundaries of civilisation, centred on the built-up surrounds of towns and cities. The love of the sublime landscape, the embrace of its dangerous allure, with its potential for engulfing those who gaze upon it, represented the Romantic imagination pushing at the limits of the outer world, pressing against the boundaries of physical being. In confronting the immensity of the sublime, the mountains, abysses and teeming waterfalls, the Romantic sought to see beyond, to catch a glimpse of the infinite. The solitude found in such settings, be they the Alps or the Lake District, also induced a contemplative state of mind which directed the imaginative gaze inward, down towards the depths of what would come to be known as the subconscious. Unpredictable, chaotic nature was a reflection of the irrational self. Alone in the wild places of the world, the Romantics saw themselves as part of the environment in which they stood. The inner landscape of the human mind contained immensities as sublime and mysterious as those which surrounded them. The philosophers and artists of The Enlightenment, the age of reason, believed that human nature could be understood through rational study (and, incidentally, could be moulded and directed as a result). The poet Alexander Pope provided a summary epigraph for the rationalist outlook with the line, from his ‘An Essay on Man’, stating that ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man’ (although the poem goes on to point out the meagre extent of true scientific knowledge). For the Romantics, reason was not the natural human state. They welcomed the ‘Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d’, to which Pope referred, even if it did occasionally create the conditions for a descent into madness. The mind, for them, was a realm of unfathomable mystery rather a seat of reason, an undiscovered country which they set out to explore.

William Blake - The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in his Dreams

William Blake provided an unlikely figurehead for those who looked to chart the inner worlds of the Romantic imagination. If the artist was seen as possessing a special vision inherent in his or her nature, rather than being a conduit for divine inspiration, then he provided a rather contradictory example. He did believe himself to be receptive to direct inspiration from the spiritual emanations of inhuman beings. Reality as perceived by the senses was a material diminution of a higher and more unified level of creation from which these emanations descended, allowing him a glimpse into immaterial dimensions. Such visitations are acknowledged in several works displayed in the exhibition. The Man Who Taught Blake Painting In His Dreams portrays a man with a noble and benevolent face which seemingly divides into chitinous cranial plates. He looks rather like an uncharacteristically cheerful Klingon. The Inspiration of the Poet shows an open-ended room contained, like a huge hearthplace, at very rear end of a much larger and completely featureless room. Within this recessed sub-room, the poet sits writing at his desk, a single lamp providing a globe of illumination above his head. A white-robed figure stands at his side, pointing to his book as if dictating, or guiding his pen. The tiny room within a larger room can easily be seen as representing the deeper level of the mind to which Blake and the Romantics sought ingress. The Bard is a more specifically British expression of the spirit of inspiration. The poet of ancient days rests in the forest, the light of creative vision showering down upon him from the radiant figures, who hover above, illuminating the dark oak branches.

Blake may have believed that he received his inspiration from external sources, but they could also be regarded as reflecting inner states, externalised projections of the divided aspects of the soul, or psyche. He developed a personal mythological system of great complexity over the course of his lifetime, which centred on the divided state of man and creation, its fall from an original state of unity. The origins of this Gnostic worldview are drawn in The Book of Urizen, pages of which feature prominently here. Remarkably, these were discovered in the 1970s by someone who had bought an old railway timetable, and discovered eight Blake prints inserted between the pages, having perhaps been used as bookmarks for particularly interesting branch lines. As with all versions of Blake’s illuminated books, they are unique, each engraving having been hand-coloured. The illuminated books were completely integrated works of art, words and pictures intertwining and combining on the page to give a visionary cosmogony detail and concrete form. These particular pages also have Blake’s own titles for the pictures added as handwritten sub-headings in their lower margins. Urizen is his version of the Old Testament God, an aged, white-bearded figure who, tired of life, imposes the limitations of order, division and law upon the world. Within the divine unity of the universe, he fashions his own tomb of imprisoning matter. His fiery, creative aspect is sheared off and becomes the figure of Los, the embodiment of Energy and imagination. Urizen is left with the cold comfort of naked Reason, a detached rationalism with which he measures and bounds his new sub-creation.

William Blake - The Book of Urizen. Everything is an attempt to be Human

Plate 6 is subtitled ‘I sought pleasure and found a prison’, and depicts the moment of this first painful division. Los screams with round mouthed and eyed horror, clutching himself as if seeking comfort, or trying to cover the raw nakedness of his newborn self-awareness. He is surrounded by flames, matching his hair, which rise into the words of the poem. ‘Los wept howling round the dark Demon/And cursing his lot for in anguish/Urizen was rent from his side’. Plate 10 is subtitled ‘Everything is an attempt to be human’. A half-formed skeletal figure looks to the sky in anguish as it endures the pain of coming into being. A pair of manacles await at its bony feet, ready to tether it to the earth. These are the ‘mind-forged manacles’ familiar from Blake’s well-known poem The Tyger. This skeleton is the framework for the physical self into which Urizen is painfully condensing himself. Los lies dislocated to his side, a mirror-figure, sundered and frozen in shock. Los is the creative side of the spirit, the imagination abstracted, his emblem a hammer, tool of both artist and artisan. He appears here like a statue sculpted with the distorted features of horror and despair. It’s easy to see the influence of the gothic carvings and tomb effigies which Blake had sketched in Westminster Abbey in his youth. The tendrils of vines curl up amongst the lines of the poem, as if bearing words as fruit. They describe the growth of the body and the awakening of the senses in terms of landscape. ‘From the caverns of his jointed spine/Down sunk with fright a red/Round globe hot burning deep/Deep down into the Abyss’.

The Book of Urizen - The floods overwhelmed me

Plate 11 is subtitled ‘the floods overwhelmed me’. The picture stands alone on the page, with no accompanying verse. Urizen hangs in the void, suspended in emptiness as if he is floating in the middle of an ocean, with no sight of land on the horizon. His beard splays out around him, and his arms are spread out wide in passive surrender. He is like Christ or Odin, hung between heaven and earth (which has yet to be created). His eyes, nose and mouth, the new sensory organs which have just formed, are dead, blank holes. Blake describes him as being ‘In ghostly torment sick,/Hanging upon the wind,/Two nostrils bent down to the deep’. Plate 15 is again a picture with no accompanying words. It is subtitled ‘Vegetating in Fibres of Blood’. This is a remarkable vision of this new subcreation, which Urizen and, inadvertently, Los are forging, as an inseperable part of the human body. Los’ feelings of pity for Urizen cause further corporeal division and the distillation of a system of planetary bodies. The raw fibres of emotion pour off his back and join with the tumbling streams of his hair, hanging downward and covering the head which he holds despairingly between his hands. Los’ body, like that of Urizen, is depicted in terms of the Romantic landscape; inner and outer topography conjoined. ‘Life in cataracts poured down his cliffs/The void shrunk lymph into Nerves/Wandring wide on the bosom of night/And left a round globe of blood/Trembling upon the void’. A bloody planet ‘conglobes’ from the deliquescing matter of Los’ body; it could be a depiction of the early, roiling, red-hot days of the earth’s formation as the solar system was being drawn together. It’s an amazing blend of science fiction and mythology, reminding me of the way in which Roger Zelazny blended genre material with tales from the Hindu scriptures in his 1967 novel Lord of Light. Blake describes how ‘The globe of lifeblood trembled/Branching out into roots:/Fibrous, writhing upon the winds:/Fibres of blood, milk and tears’. This planetary body becomes the first female form, known as Enitharmon.

Plate 17 is subtitled ‘In the female death became new life’. The first woman is formed from the matter of Los’ pity, the new planetary body given human form. The verses on this plate are in the bottom half with stalks and vines rising to flower into the figures of Los and Enitharmon. There is a division between the coppery fire (a reflection, perhaps, of the copper plates in which the outlines of these images were etched) from which Enitharmon rises and the darkness in which Los curls in exhaustion and womb-like retreat. Los comforts Enitharmon, refusing to abandon her having brought her into existence. Blake describes how ‘Los saw the Female and pitied./He embraced her, she wept she refused/In perverse and cruel delight/She fled from his arms, yet he followd’. Further division ensues as they give birth to a child which will become Orc, the spirit of human energy, rebellion and revolution in Blake’s mythological scheme. The flames from which Enitharmon is retreating are from the forge of creation. They anticipate ‘the birth of the Human shadow’. It is not a joyful birth, however, as the downturned cast of her mouth and anguished eyes make plain.

Blake’s singular example of the unification of word, artisanal technique and visionary image was essentially inimitable, and his works were little understood or appreciated in his lifetime. His insistence on the validity of his own imaginative worlds in the face of indifference or derision made him a huge influence on ensuing Romantic artists, even if he was at odds with the Romantic temperament himself. His self-created mythology was an act of world-building which finds a place in the long and continuing tradition of the fantastic in the arts. It was out of kilter with the rationalist philosophy of the age, against which Blake’s work was partly a reaction. Perhaps it means more in the modern age, in which the idea of the fantastic is once more an accepted aspect of art and literature, and for which it offers a countervailing worldview to the all-pervasive culture of materialism.

Henry Fuseli - Titania and Bottom

Blake’s contemporary, friend and sometime collaborator Henry Fuseli made a far greater impact in his time, achieving considerable recognition and critical approval. He explored the creative possibilities of nightmares, mining deeply into his morbid imagination. Something of his self-image can be seen in his Self-Portrait As A Faun. Leering with a sensuous, full-lipped mouth, it is a self-conscious depiction of an inner self which revelled in its own licentiousness, uninhibited by any sense of conventional moral limitations. It’s an image, and implied philosophy, which anticipates the spirit of Surrealism. Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, from 1781, has become a defining and much imitated image of the terrors of dark dreams, and the murky layers of the subconscious from which they emerge. The painting on display her, Titania and Bottom, depicts a scene from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was a favourite with the Romantics. The central figures, including Bottom with his transfigured donkey’s head, are surrounded by the deep darkness of the forest at night, from which a proliferating horde of grotesque creatures emerge. Fuseli lets his imagination fly in creating demonic transformations of the human form, hybrids spliced together in the laboratory of the mind. His night creatures are genuinely menacing, hoodlum homunculi with wicked grins, intent on malicious mayhem. One sullen old miniaturised fellow is kept on a leash, as if he is too frightful to be let loose even amongst this mob. Or perhaps he is an ageing changeling, grown wizened and stunted from his time in fairyland, and kept now as a grudgeful and spite-filled pet. Across the central hallway of the Tate, in the Art and the Sublime display (which has now ended, I belatedly note) which acts as an adjunct to this exhibition, can be found Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, from 1812. This shows the scene in which Macbeth emerges from the murder of King Duncan, and is met by Lady Macbeth. The blood on the daggers and on his clothes provides the only primary colour in the picture. Macbeth and his Lady are depicted as pallid ghosts, outlined in spectral white against the darkness, doomed forever to re-enact their bloody acts.

Richard Dadd - A Bacchanalian Scene

The opening of inner worlds has its inherent dangers. Journey too far and too thoroughly inward and pre-existent fractures can be widened, precipitating mental dissolution. Richard Dadd stands as an exemplar of such a fate, succumbing to a psychotic breakdown which resulted in the murder of his father and his spending the rest of his life in the asylum at Bedlam, and later Broadmoor. Angela Carter’s radio play Come Unto These Yellow Sands mixes a mock-critical assessment of his life and paintings with a biographical depiction of the way in which the worlds of the imagination can overwhelm the artist who leaves him or herself open to their influence. Dadd’s most famous picture, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, which he painted over many years in Bedlam (finally finishing it in 1864), is included here, alongside his Bacchanalian Scene from 1862. The latter is like a close-up of some of the spectators of the Fairy Feller’s incipient blow. Curving and spiralling twists of grass in the foreground give an idea of the miniaturised scale, a jungle in the greensward. The figures sipping from the bacchanalian cup and peering sideways out at us have strangely compressed features, with almond, slightly oriental eyes. Perhaps these reflected some of the people he had come across his travels in the Near and Middle East, during which he had begun to lose his mind. The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke is packed with similarly compressed figures, all gathered amongst the grasses, lichens and daisies. The more closely you look, the more creatures emerge, all either engaged in their own activities or watching to see the Fairy Feller wield his axe. In the upper left hand corner, a daddy long-legs blows a long, spindly trumpet, a fanfare for the blow which will split the carefully placed sweet chestnut in two. The compression of Dadd’s fairy creatures suggest a delicate airiness which feels the weight of gravity pressing heavily down upon them, as well as the pressure of the artist’s over-fertile imagination on his own head.

Dadd’s paintings tend to be very compact in size, whilst at the same time containing a wealth of painstaking detail. This is at the opposite end to the grand scale of the Romantic sublime, which revels in great and overwhelming scale, the subject matter sometimes extending to he size of the painting itself. This can be immediately seen as you enter the gallery in which the Art and the Sublime exhibition is hung, and your eye is immediately drawn to the huge canvases of James Wards’ Gordale Scar and John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings. These depictions of outer and inner worlds exist at opposite ends of the spectrum, but both contain immensities, stretching the limits of human perception by staring at the great and the small and seeking to break through to what lies beyond. Looking hard enough in both directions, outward and inward, it becomes evident that both are contained one within the other, as John Crowley suggests in his modern novel of fairy worlds intersecting with the real, Little Big; A self-reflecting recession of images caught between two mirrors.

Samuel Palmer - Evening

Another painter who tended to work on a very small scale was Samuel Palmer. He was greatly influenced by William Blake, whom he knew towards the end of his life. Palmer created a dream of an Arcadian Albion, a rural paradise which he drew from his imaginative recasting of the Darenth Valley around Shoreham, in Kent. This is an area I know well, having been frequently driven there as a child. It’s within easy reach of the South London suburbs, and like much of the ‘garden’ of Kent, is now enmeshed in a gridwork of busy transport links rushing towards the capital. Thankfully, a proposed motorway development which would have plunged through the heart of the valley was fought off, but the insect hum of traffic along its alternate ridgeway route is now a permanent background drone, along with the regular dervish whoosh of passing Eurostar trains. Palmer’s landscapes are often bathed in the glow of a burnished autumnal light, or illuminated by a full and round waxing moon. They are usually set during harvest time. Having said which, the painting displayed here, A Dream In the Apennines (1864), is on a relatively large scale, and is taken from his travels on the continent. It does have a similarly calm, bucolic air, however. Palmer didn’t seek the grandiose spectacle of the sublime when he went abroad. The figures here are perfectly at home in this landscape. Rome is a distant dream on the plain down below, a series of shadows beneath the pastel colours of the sunset sky. Grapes and goats replace wheat and sheep, but otherwise the atmosphere is much the same as it is in the Shoreham pictures. The mezzotint Evening, from 1834, is more typical, with its depiction of a shepherd dozing beside his obedient flock, recumbent beneath a sickle moon.

Palmer created a reverie of a golden age which never really existed outside of his imagination. A drowsy and dreamlike countryside expunged of poverty and starvation, mud and rain, and the back-breaking round of hard labour. His Shoreham was a pocket paradise, akin to what John Clute, in the Encylopedia of Fantasy, calls a polder. This is a word which derives from Dutch and indicates a low lying area of land reclaimed from surrounding water and maintained against further encroachment with ditches and dykes. Clute adopts it to describe those enchanted valleys or villages which are protected from the corrosive effects of the world which surrounds them. His definition, in terms of fantastic art and literature, describes ‘an active microcosm, armed against the potential wrongness of that which surrounds it, an anachronism consciously opposed to wrong time’. Samuel Palmer turned Shoreham into a polder of the mind, which he elucidated in his paintings, and into which he attempted to escape, a disappearing act which became increasingly difficult at the Victorian age built up a head of steam. The autumnal atmosphere and preference for late afternoon or sunset hues which colour his vision of an earthly paradise suggests that Palmer conceded his dream world was not eternal, and would soon pass.

I have drawn comparison elsewhere between Palmer’s paintings and the similarly contained and deliberately artificial stage-set world of the film A Company of Wolves, which was scripted by Angela Carter from her original recasting of the matter of fairy tales. Its forest setting is created from the imagination of an adolescent girl, and is another dreamworld which seems fragile and subject to disintegration upon waking. The film is an indication of how Palmer’s vision of an English paradise has proven intoxicating enough to endure, however. It proved to be a major influence on the Neo-romantics, the artists who emerged between the wars in the twentieth century, and revived the traditions of Romanticism in a new form. Their debt to Palmer is most explicitly acknowledged here in Graham Sutherland’s Cray Fields, which is a pastiche of the style of his engravings. The sun shines with a brilliant radiance through a copse of hop poles which stands on the edge of a wheat field, in which two men are working, bent under heavy loads. A star hangs above, visible even in daylight, keeping watch over this blessed landscape. Sutherland’s landscapes would become much more violent and less cultivated over time. He, like the other Neo-romantics, incorporated elements of modernism, recasting the Romantic vision in a twentieth century context. Figures were depicted in more geometrical forms, landscapes moved more towards a semi-abstraction, and the whole was subjected to Cubist fracture and the suggestive juxtaposition of unrelated objects favoured by the Surrealists.

Graham Sutherland - Entrance to a Lane

Sutherland’s Green Tree Form:Interior of Woods is a gnarled head of twisted protuberances, covered in lichenous green and set on a long grey tubular body. It could be a grotesque, barnacle encrusted creature of the deeps. His Entrance to a Lane is an abstracted landscape whose elements are jumbled up, and whose horizontal plane seems to be curling back up and over towards the viewer like a crashing wave. The grey of the road, with its white line, is like a tongue leading towards the maw of the thicketed wood. There seems to be a disembodied bicycle wheel beside the road, just in front of this portal, but of the cyclist, there is no sign. Welsh Landscape with Roads is a similarly unforgiving depiction of an elemental and indifferent nature, with a distended, blood-red sun hanging on the horizon like an unfriendly UFO. A figure is running down the mustard yellow road, arms thrown up in apparent fear. There are what seem to be the shapes of corn ricks, upon which the red sun casts its baleful light, in one circular field, although they could equally be the preparations for some ritual, the enactment of which the figure is attempting to flee. The ominous, ritualistic feel of the landscape is completed by the jagged sheep’s skull which lies in the bottom left corner. It looks like it could be a remnant of some far off Mesozoic age, whose atmosphere this land still exudes. The Black Landscape is again inspired by the Welsh landscape. A tarry and black mountain, redolent of the coal which lies beneath it, looms under a pink sky (lit by a pink moon?) In the foreground, fractured (possibly mined) gray fields of slate reflect the sky. A fistful of hardy plants are outlined on the horizon of the hill to the left. The mountain reaches a sharply clawed hand towards them. The whole landscape looks like a beast on the verge of rising with a devouring hunger.

Paul Nash - Pillar and Moon

Paul Nash (who I wrote about a while back) is represented by several paintings here. Totes Meer is one of his well-known pictures from the Second World War, and indicates his affinity with Surrealism. A dead sea of airplane wreckage sluggishly washes up on a sandy shore, piling up into a jagged tideline. It’s a bleak, wintry scene, lit by a cold moon. You can almost hear the grind and rasp of rusting metal, the harsh wartime replacement for the soothing rhythms of waves breaking and receding. The Flight of the Magnolia, from 1944, is another Surrealist work, in which the white petals of the blossom float hugely in the sky, the floral equivalent of one of Magritte’s apples or boulders. It harks back to Constable’s cloud studies or Turner’s hazy blurring of built-up horizon and sky. The flower merges with or emerges from the clouds, which themselves are scarcely distinguishable from the ocean waves. It seems almost to be crushing the distended, egg-like shape of the moon, which appears like a petal which has been torn off. The blossom also resembles the unfolding petals of a parachute. It is an emblem of life during wartime, a transient and fleeting thing which feels all the more precious as a result. The flower of the imagination is given free, if temporary, flight. Pillar and Moon is more typical of Nash’s evocation of the spirit of place of the English landscape, and of his imbuing of it with a deeply personal solar and lunar symbolism. Here, the stone globe atop the pillar is linked by the elevated runway of the treeline to the rocky sphere of the moon, a branch line to the heavens. The row of trees recedes in diminishing perspective before curving to the right, dividing sky from earth. The trees cast moonshadows which spread out to connect with the grey stone wall, the pillar itself standing like a geometrical treeshadow. There is a sense of yearning conveyed by the picture, a gulf which will never be bridged. The pillar becomes almost like one of Caspar David Friedrich’s figures, gazing out to sea. The pillar and trees also stand in for the megaliths of Avebury and the twin hills of the Wittenham Clumps which were the signature features of Nash’s most powerful landscape paintings, but which are absent from this exhibition.

John Piper - Seaton Delaval

John Piper’s Seaton Delaval, from 1941, is a picture of a ruined castle in Northumberland designed by John Vanbrugh in the 18th century. Piper was commissioned to draw numerous pieces of England’s architectural heritage during the war, to create a record in the event of their destruction. Seaton Delaval had already been destroyed by fire in 1822, and its state served as a premonition of the fate which might befall other grand country seats. The bland façade of the building looks like a theatrical flat propped up against a painted backdrop. It is boldly outlined, and smudged with the colours of firelit nightime. The pink, red and orange over the door look like they have been blended from carefully aimed theatrical spotlights. Perhaps they are cast by the flames of a November bonfire, or by the conflagration of a bombing raid. The idea of the Romantic ruin is now the prospect of the war damaged rubble after an air raid.

Keith Vaughan - Cain and Abel

Two other Neo-Romantic artists featured here focus on the human form rather than the landscape. Michael Ayrton tackles the Biblical subject of The Temptation of St Anthony, which had stirred the imaginations of Matthias Grunewald in the 16th century, and Max Ernst in the twentieth to lurid heights of delirious grotesquerie. Ayrton’s tableau is considerably more restrained, and a lot less explicit in its violence. St Anthony is still twisted in agonised contortions, but there is a sense that his pain is located more in his head than in any mortifications meted out on his flesh. His tormentors are more recognisably human than the sharp fanged and clawed devils who attack Grunewald and Ernst’s St Anthony. The man and woman who stand on either side of him are in starkly contrasting states of health, he bony and emaciated, she plumply voluptuous. A figure in the foreground, his cranium distended into a bulbous balloon, seems to have snatched the cruciform staff from the saint’s hands, and is kneeling in mock supplication. These are the demons of Anthony’s mind. Keith Vaughan’s Cain and Abel, from 1946, depicts the brothers as stark, granitic figures, like sculptural forms. Cain cradles Abel in his arms, the jawbone with which he has killed him still clutched in his right hand. It is an archetypally powerful image. They are isolated against a featureless volcanic landscape, which resembles the location used by Pasolini in the primal episodes featuring speechless cannibal bandits in Pigsty (Porcile). The beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey also comes to mind. Or they could be characters in a Samuel Beckett play, marooned in the externalised desert of their inner landscape. For a painting created just after the end of the war, it has an obvious resonance with the age.

A contemporary reflection on the legacy of Romanticism is found in a collection of modern photography gathered under the title British Landscape: Photography After the Picturesque. I have to say, in all honesty, that the purpose of these pictures completely passed me by, and I was in all likelihood suffering from gallery fatigue by this time anyway. Who know, to the receptive viewer they might prove revelatory. The exhibition as a whole brings together a disparate selection of the Tate’s collection, and makes it clear what a sustained influence the idea of Romanticism has had on the artistic imagination (and on the general notion of what an artist is). It’s an idea which has become so all-pervasive that it no longer really needs a label. Maybe Chatterton didn’t die in vain after all.