Boy reading a book

‘Young man asleep before an open book’, 1629, by Rembrandt van Rijn

For bookish-minded bloggers there’s an appeal in seeing others involved in the activity they themselves enjoy.

I’ve already posted a picture gallery of a selection of girls and young women reading – here – which seems to have proved a source of delight to many. But I was puzzled as to why there seemed to be fewer portraits of boys and young men with their nose in a book, certainly online.

We know from studies that girls enjoy reading more than boys, but is this the main or only reason why there’s an apparent gender disparity in paintings of readers? Is this an aspect of the negative stereotyping existing in society, that reading and books are not for boys?

Girl reading a book

Photo: Puffin Books

For the bookish-minded there is often a tingle of recognition when an individual is spotted so engrossed in a book that they’re almost unaware of their surroundings. They seem to hold in their hands a time machine, a portal transporting them to past eras or parallel worlds, seeing vistas and meeting people they wouldn’t encounter in real life.

And isn’t it curious that when we come across a static image of a child or an adult reading a book we ourselves start to try and ‘read’ the picture – the subject’s response to the text, the comfort or otherwise of their chosen position, indeed any hidden signs that will allow us to interpret how things stand?

Also, have you noticed how many painted portraits of, especially, female readers there are? Do they really surpass pictures of men perusing a book, or is that a false impression? At any rate, here are a number of paintings that have particularly impressed me which treat this subject.

The goblin master

Arthur Rackham:
Masterpieces of Art
by Joseph Simas.
Flame Tree Publishing, 2015.

A treasured book in my childhood – unfortunately no longer in my possession – was The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book, a hardback first published in 1933 with “23 favourite tales” and a full-colour dust jacket labelled ‘Hop-o’-my-thumb went up to the Ogre softly and pulled off his seven-league boots.’

That selection of fairytales ranged from traditional English tales through Grimm, Perrault, Andersen, and even Washington Irving, to the Arabian Nights, and featured full-page colour illustrations by Rackham, with some black and white pen and ink vignettes and silhouettes peppered through the text.

Forever nostalgic for a missing childhood gem I therefore pounced on this art book when I spotted it in the library to help ease the ache of loss; and a delightful romp through the range of Rackham’s œuvre it certainly proved.

Theatres of illusion

Giuseppe Badiali, ‘A mausoleum’ (RIBA Drawings Collection)

Stage designs
by Wynne Jeudwine.
Country Life Books, 1968.

If we may accept the definition of fantasy as the act or art of imagining impossible or improbable things, then its manifestation comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes, manners and places. Long before moving images on a screen one way to experience a fantasy world was to enjoy it in what the author of this volume terms “the theatre of illusion”.

A key element for the theatre’s visualisation, which steadily developed through the 16th and 17th centuries, was stage design. Graphic art specialist Wynne Jeudwine tells us that the theatre of illusion was concerned “not so much to reflect and enhance the mood of the drama as to create a sense of wonder,” with its ingenious perspective, colour effects and created spaces for movement.

During what the author terms “the years of glory”, between 1640 and 1730, set designers attempted to build on and outdo their predecessors and contemporaries; and though only their drawings remain (most of those in this book chosen from the collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects) these sketches have merits as works of graphic art. We nevertheless have to work hard to imagine the impossible or improbable things that may have once been conjured up within their material if illusory forms.

Simple yet elegant

Dust jacket based on Wyndham Payne design for Christmas wrapping paper

Design: Wyndham Payne
by William Connelly and Paul Payne.
ACC Art Books, 2020.

A designer of dust jackets for crime fiction by Agatha Christie, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and novels by Vera Brittain and Richmal Compton; an illustrator for books and magazines like Punch and Vogue; a designer of advertisements, greetings cards and calendars; a printmaker and model maker. Who am I referring to?

I must admit Wyndham Payne was not a name I’d ever heard of let alone rated till this book came into my hands. With a biographical essay by William Connelly (which first appeared 2005-6) and additional material by one of the artist’s grandsons, this well-illustrated retrospective gives an excellent introduction to a largely self-taught artist who deserves to be better known and appreciated.

He also was an avid collector of bric-a-brac and bargains from junk shops – what he called ‘gubbins shops’ – resulting in the purchase of what appeared to be a later copy but was in fact an original 15th-century painting of the Crucifixion on vellum by Herman Scheerre, now in the British Library. And a watercolour copy of a Rembrandt painting he purchased at auction later turned out to be by Constable.

April with his sweet showers

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Venus Verticordia

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Tomorrow is kalendae apriles — the kalends of April — and in ancient Rome it was was marked by the festival known as the Veneralia, the feast day of Venus Verticordia (“Venus the changer of hearts”). April then would have been the month dedicated to the goddess Venus.

It seems an apt time to conjure up the notion of love when there’s a lot of hating going on the world: as Peter and Gordon sang in 1964 in the Paul McCartney song, “I don’t care what they say I won’t stay | In a world without love.”

Below I list ten related facts for your edification, but in honour of the better known association of the first day of April one of them will be a factoid or fake news; can you guess which one it is?

Cherry on the top

Joos van Cleve, Madonna of the Cherries (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery)

Two, four, six, eight,
Mary at the cottage gate
Eating cherries off a plate,
Two, four, six, eight.

As we hurtle towards the end of this most eventful, least forgettable year, and we approach the day when we are encouraged to trust that peace may come to people of good will, let us pause awhile and contemplate one version of the image that is associated with Christmas, the Madonna and Child.

With this final visit to the canvases of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery for 2020 I present you with my thoughts on a Renaissance painting called The Madonna of the Cherries by Netherlands artist Joos van Cleve, who died around 1540 or 1541, leaving his wife a widow.

Existing in several versions, with the composition sometimes reversed, the Bristol example caught my eye for various reasons, some of which may resonate with you too.

The 1903 Delhi Durbar

Delhi Durbar, 1903

It’s about time for another visit to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, and this time there’ll be just one painting for my virtual viewing: The State Entry into Delhi, also known as The Delhi Durbar of 1903.

Painted in 1907 by the British-born American artist Roderick Dempster MacKenzie (1865–1941) it’s a mammoth canvas, 2.9 metres by 3.7 metres (nine and a half feet by twelve). Protected by reflecting glass I found it impossible to get a clear overall shot as it was marginally obscured by pillars supporting a balcony above, but I was at least able to get in close to observe details. (The original version in Delhi is even larger: 3.3 metres by 5, or eleven feet by seventeen.)

It’s a controversial painting these days, of course, with its explicit imperialist and colonialist messages. And, rightly, the museum last year had placed it opposite Devolved Parliament, Banksy’s 2009 satire of Britain’s archaic parliamentarianism, with adult chimpanzees taking the place of the honourable members: both canvases, each separated by a century, had been curated to encourage questioning about traditional attitudes and their relationship with evolving values in the 21st century.

Here I want to look at a few details of Mackenzie’s work and discuss its artistic merits within a broader context.

Dream worlds

The Garden Court, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery

It’s time for another visit to Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. We’ve been here a few times before, looking at canvases depicting interiors, portraits, seascapes.

Now we look back to an imagined Middle Ages, courtesy of a Pre-Raphaelite painter, plus another artist influenced by that backwards-looking movement.

Finally in this post I cross the Bristol Channel to glance at another PRB painting in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, Amgueddfa Cymru. What is the appeal of this rosy-tinted view of the past?

All at sea

I hope you’re ready for another visit to Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in this, the seventh of a series of posts examining artworks which have caught my eye.

This time I look at a trio of paintings themed with the sea. They all feature a craft or vessel on the water, either in a dangerous situation or after that time of crisis.

Unlike the portraits and interiors we previously put under the microscope these three paintings emphasise the open sea as a place of peril. How exactly do they do this?

Male gaze

The Pianist (c 1900) by Eugène Carrière

As some of you know, I’m a pianist. Not a very good one, you understand, but good enough to accompany choirs and soloists and occasionally play in amateur orchestras and ensembles. Plus, armed with a piano teaching diploma (a licenciate, no less!) from the Royal Academy of Music, I taught piano for several years.

So it was that I was drawn to a painting — yet another in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery — entitled The Pianist. Painted around 1900 by Eugène Carrière (1849–1906), a noted symbolist artist, it practically dared me to throw my professional musician’s and arty amateur’s eye over it.

For good measure, I want to also discuss it in conjunction with a couple of other paintings in this gallery, partly to include some thoughts in the perennial debate about what’s known as the male gaze.

The mirror not yet crack’d

A woman stands in front of an oval mirror. She is seeing if a shawl she is trying on suits her. She has been standing there for more than a century — since 1910 in fact. And I too have stood for a long time looking at her looking at the looking glass, in which I wasn’t reflected.

The Mackerel Shawl was painted by Algernon Talmage (1871–1939) and has been hanging in Bristol Museum & Art Gallery since it was acquired in 1913. Whenever I visit the gallery I am often drawn to it, but have not really thought why. Until now.

For it has stories to tell, and I want to tell you what it has told me.

Parliament of the Apes

When I last visited Bristol in August of this year I took the opportunity to wander again around the Museum and Art Gallery, always a delight whenever back in the city I spent so much of my life in. As a way to distract from the never-ending crisis that is Brexit it is always a bonus to get a longer and more positive perspective on history and culture.

An unexpected highlight of my unhurried stroll within this temple of the Muses proved to be a temporary display of a large canvas. Entitled Devolved Parliament, it was created in 2009 by the Bristol artist known as Banksy. To the casual visitor the painting of the Commons chamber of the Houses of Parliament filled with chimpanzees may strike them as confusing or whimsical, but as with all this artist’s work there is more to this piece than meets the innocent eye.

This of course makes it an ideal subject for discussion in my series of occasional posts about the stories behind the images and other objets d’art housed in this Bristol building.

Invitation

Don’t you ever wish you could walk into a painting? Step in, nose around corners, peer down corridors, approach closer to a distant view through an opening?

That’s what many traditional representations try to do: invite you to explore an interior, marvel at the illusion that this could be a real space, a looking glass in which you aren’t reflected but an invisible fourth wall through which you could walk, like Alice, into an imaginary theatre set.

Here is the second of my wordy wanderings through selected works of art in Bristol’s Museum and Art Gallery, this time courtesy of Fred Elwell’s view of a house in Beverley, East Yorkshire.

A thousand words

St Luke drawing the Virgin and Child

A picture is worth a thousand words, so it’s said. On that basis, I shall expend no more than a thousand words on a late 15th-century painting I recently saw on loan from the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

What I intend to do is draw out the narrative explicit and implicit in this late medieval Flemish image, and go a little beyond the core details contained in the adjoining gallery label.