Van Gogh, Monet, Turner, Renoir, Degas impress at NGA exhibition
The National Gallery of Australia’s Van Gogh to Botticelli exhibition is astounding. And the second half of the exhibition deserves special mention
A couple of weeks ago the first half of this exhibition was discussed here, from the early Renaissance to Dutch and Spanish works of the 17th century. These works also happened to be mainly narrative or history subjects, while in this second half, roughly covering the 18th and 19th centuries, the majority of the pictures are portraits and landscapes.
There is a fine selection of English portraits from the 17th and 18th centuries, including works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Wright of Derby and Stubbs. The earliest is by Rubens’ brilliant Flemish pupil Sir Anthony van Dyck, a portrait of two sisters, although it is not his most impressive work. He is not helped by the fact that his sitters appear to be particularly vacant young women, but in any case female portraits in this period, except in Protestant Holland, tend to be more anodyne than those of men. We can see, for example, how much more character there is in Frans Hals’ female sitter, or in Gerrit van Honthorst’s portrait of Elizabeth Stuart, sister of Charles I and Queen of Bohemia, after the loss of both her husband and her crown.
Gainsborough’s famous portrait of Mrs Siddons, the great tragic actress, is both remote and intense – the label points out that she was performing Lady Macbeth at the time of the sitting. Next to it is Sir Joshua Reynolds’ entirely different treatment of Lady Cockburn with several of her children, evoking the allegorical emblem of Caritas as a mother surrounded by infants. Lawrence’s portrait of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, is impressive and his small picture of John Julius Angerstein, briefly mentioned last time, stands out for its acute, almost troubling sense of an inner life.
The portrait of a young Englishman in Rome by Pompeo Batoni, a specialist in British visitors, serves as a natural transition to the subject of the Grand Tour. Richard Milles, a wealthy gentleman and later MP for Canterbury, poses in new clothes which he may have bought in Venice; he points to a map which suggests that he has travelled through the Swiss canton of Grisons and then Venice; the bust of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, as a youth and several books allude to the intellectual and moral improvement he hopes to gain from his experience of the remains of antiquity.
Several pictures of Venice by the great vedutisti Canaletto and Guardi hang in the adjacent room. Venice was not only an ancient city-state, whose unique republican constitution had operated successfully for a millennium, but the opulent and exotic European gateway to the Orient. It was already famous as the most picturesque city in the world, and was the first to become in its own right a subject for painters; if Rome was even more picturesque, it was only because of the spectacular remains of antiquity, as we see in Vernet’s view of Rome in the same room, which focuses on the Castel Sant’Angelo, formerly the tomb of Hadrian, and the Ponte Sant’Angelo, built at the same time as the tomb, but by now adorned with angels by Bernini.
It is worth reflecting for a moment – at this time when almost all international travel has been suspended – on the nature and purpose of the Grand Tour. The term is a loose one that describes the travel that young men of the upper classes undertook in the early modern period as a sequel and complement to their formal education at school and university – in Milles’ case, at Westminster School, still one of the finest in England, and St John’s College at Cambridge. The itinerary varied, but almost inevitably centred on Rome, as the capital of the Roman empire and – since Greece was in the hands of the hostile Ottomans and out of bounds until the later 18th century – effectively the most important centre of antiquity as well as one of the most influential capitals of modern culture. Venice, Florence and Naples were other favourite destinations.
Many early texts deal with the Grand Tour, but two of the most accessible are the letters of Charles de Brosses written during his travels in 1739-40 (De Brosses also popularised the term “fetishism” in a later study of African cults; the concept was subsequently taken up by Hegel and then by Marx and Freud) and Goethe’s Italian Journey (Italienische Reise, 1816-17), an account of his travels in 1786-87, by which time the itinerary had expanded beyond Naples to include Sicily.
What these and other documents reveal is an approach to travel that is antithetical to the later romantic dream of losing oneself in an alien environment, let alone the grossly debased version of that dream in modern mass tourism, which takes uneducated people to see things they don’t understand under circumstances that reduce their contact with any living culture to a minimum. On the contrary, these young men, who are being prepared for lives of leadership and service to the state, are not only seeking to learn more about the civilisations they have read about in their studies, but almost equally interested in the details of government, administration and even engineering in a modern state.
Another pair of portraits – Wright of Derby’s charming picture of a young married couple going for a ride in the country and George Stubbs’ seemingly casual but actually carefully composed group portrait commemorating a marriage between two distinguished families and set under a massive oak tree evocative of ancient lineage – leads implicitly to a section devoted to landscape. And as landscape asserts itself increasingly, in the 19th century, as the leading genre of painting, this section in turn continues into the final room of the exhibition.
There are too many landscapes to discuss in detail, but the two most important figures at the beginning of the modern tradition, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, are represented by works that are hung opposite each other. This is one of many examples of intelligent and relevant juxtaposition in the exhibition; another is the hanging of Turner, so influenced by Claude, on the same wall and separated by the opening into the next room. In contrast, the pictures by Ruysdael and Constable could have been better chosen to bring out their affinities.
The Claude painting is a work from his forties, and he still had a long and profound development – over three decades of work – ahead of him. But it is a very fine seaport scene which particularly exemplifies the qualities that fascinated Turner, especially the view straight into the setting sun, the extraordinary luminosity that fills and animates the composition, and the abyss of infinite light in the background.
The Turner composition is one of his masterpieces, in contrast to the rather uneven standard of the Turner paintings shown in Australia in recent years. The subject of this picture is Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) taunting the Cyclops Polyphemus after he and his men have escaped from the cave and are sailing away. This was a foolish act, because until then the Cyclops only knew him by the name he had previously given, “Outis”, which means no one. Now he declares his identity, and this allows Polyphemus to invoke his father Poseidon and call down a curse upon Odysseus and his men.
The picture repays close attention, which reveals details not easily seen in reproduction: the giant is represented as a shadowy form on the mountaintop; Ulysses can eventually be made out on the deck of his ship among a confusion of other figures; strange wraithlike shapes appear in the foam where the prow of the vessel cleaves through the waves; finally the right side of the composition is dominated by an explosion of golden light from a sun right on the horizon.
The Poussin painting is not one of his better-known works in the London collection, and the colours seem to have darkened with age, but it nonetheless communicates an irresistible and unique sense of poise, groundedness and stillness. We are drawn into the space of the road, yet anchored to the earth by the powerful groups of trees; familiar themes are recalled, like the water of life and the still surface that evokes the calm mind of the sage. One wayfarer washes his feet, another couple seem to be talking about the structures around them, probably tombs like those that line the Via Appia outside Rome.
These stone structures set horizontals and verticals which echo the axes of the picture plane itself and act as keynotes for the rest of the composition – to be repeated in the ground, the tree trunks, and elsewhere. And it is this architectonic sense of composition that fascinates all the landscape painters who follow in Poussin’s footsteps, particularly Corot, whose view of Avignon in the next room has a similar play of horizontal and vertical built structures in the centre of the composition, and Cézanne, who was inspired by Poussin both directly and indirectly through Corot and his pupil Pissarro.
There are two pictures by Cézanne, one a very fine portrait of an old woman, his housekeeper and a former nun, telling her rosary, the other a late landscape whose foreground is dominated by impressive rock formations, possibly an abandoned quarry; in the background, is a little cubic building of the kind we see in the views of Mont Sainte-Victoire too, and which are once again like a keynote reminding us of the fundamental and ideal axes of horizontal and vertical to which many natural forms in the picture approximate.
There is a beautiful view by Monet of his lily pond and Japanese bridge, in the garden that he had established like a sort of set for plein-air painting – where he could work in comfort, with motifs that he had designed himself, free of interruptions and protected from the vicissitudes of weather. This picture belongs to a period when Monet was already becoming absorbed in the artificial world he had produced as his own subject, but had not yet begun to stare directly into the pond and rediscover the world only in its reflection in the water – which would eventually lead him from the neo-naturalistic beginning of his career to its almost mystical conclusion.
Finally, the exhibition effectively concludes with the famous Sunflowers – one of several versions of this motif that Van Gogh painted in 1888 as decorations for Gauguin’s bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles, and in anticipation of the visit that eventuated later in the year and in the end proved fatal to Vincent’s sanity. The painting itself is a tour de force, using almost nothing but various hues of yellow, only relieved by the green of the leaves and the violet-blue outlines of the vase, to evoke an intense effect of luminosity – brilliant, but as ambivalent and disturbing as the vision of a world unhinged in The Starry Night.
Botticelli to Van Gogh – Part Two
National Gallery of Australia, until June 14
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