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Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World @ the National Portrait Gallery

From the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones…

Introduction

Cecil Beaton (1904 to 1980) was a phenomenon. He made himself into the leading fashion photographer of his day, but that was far from being his only achievement: he was also a fashion illustrator, a painter, a writer of fashion essays and books (34 books in total), a social caricaturist, a serious wartime photographer, a costume and set designer for theatre and the movies, while all the time keeping one of the classic celebrity diaries of the century (at his death he left no fewer than 143 diaries which were published in 6 handsome volumes).

But the core of his achievement was the forty years he spent as a leading figure in fashion photography and that’s what this grand exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery focuses on. Aptly titled ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’, it is the first exhibition to exclusively explore Beaton’s pioneering contributions to fashion photography.

It’s designed to be a landmark show, with some 250 items on display, mostly wonderful photos but also including Beaton’s:

  • drawings
  • illustrations
  • magazine covers
  • a youthful home movie he and friends made of fooling around
  • several painted portraits of him by artist friends
  • and, in display cases:
    • a handsome collection of first editions of 20 or so of his books
    • the actual Kodak camera he did his early work on
    • the Oscar he won for ‘My Fair Lady’

1920s and ’30s

After the Second World War Beaton spent more time doing set and stage design, and in America working in Hollywood. It’s from this period that date the many classic portraits of notable actors and artists and, in particular, of Hollywood stars from the 1950s and ’60s, which many of us are familiar with. These are regularly shown in exhibitions with titles like ‘Cecil Beaton: Portraits’ but that’s not what this one is about. This one really does focus on his fashion photography and related work (illustrations, covers, books) and so has lots of his photos for Vogue magazine from 1927 to 1937, depicting upper-middle class debutantes and society ladies in wonderfully elaborate outfits against ornately staged backdrops, none of whom we’ve heard of and will ever hear of again.

Princess Emeline De Broglie by Cecil Beaton (1928) Gelatin silver print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Thus the very first room hosts 16 very big silver gelatin prints which survive from the landmark exhibition of Beaton portraits which the National Portrait Gallery held back in 1968. The curators point out that it was the first such show accorded a living photographer and helped to cement his reputation as ‘the finest arbiter of taste of the twentieth century’. And these 16 big black-and-white portraits are, indeed, stunning in composition and execution. But what I’m saying is they’re all of people you and I have never heard of: society figures from the 1920s and ’30s who are long forgotten. For example:

  • Sita Devi, Princess Karam of Kapurthala, 1935
  • The Honourable Mrs Richard Norton (Jean Norton), late 1920s
  • Paula Gellibrand, the Marquesa de Casa Maury, 1928
  • Mrs Harrison Williams (Mona Williams), 1936
  • Hazel, Lady Lavery, late 1920s
  • Mrs Robert H. McAdoo (Lorraine McAdoo), 1934
  • Lady Sylvia Ashley, 1934
  • Mrs Allan Ryan, Junior (Janet Ryan), 1929
  • Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse, 1932

A few leading actors are included (the beautiful young Vivienne Leigh) but the Hollywood celebs, for the most part, come a lot later.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing three portraits from the first room recreating of the 1968 show: note the elaborate paper-cut roses on the wall, echoing Beaton’s classic floral backgrounds (photo by the author)

Beaton’s beginnings

After this introductory room of greatest hits from the 1920s, The show is laid out in a straightforward chronological order. It starts with Cecil being born the son of a prosperous timber merchant in Hampstead. He had two sisters (Nancy and Barbara aka ‘Baba’) who appear in his earliest photos, as well as photos of his mother, Etty. After prep and public school, he got a place at Cambridge, where he studied history, art and architecture but wasn’t very academically minded and put most of his energy into theatre and the Footlights Revue.

The early rooms contain photos of his two glamorous sisters, Cambridge friends and society contacts. These include a wonderful picture of the artist Rex Whistler posing as a character from a Watteau painting. We learn that this was one of a series of tableaux en fête champêtre (‘pictures from a country festival’), a homage to the stylised paintings of Lancret, Watteau and Fragonard held at Wilsford Manor, Stephen Tennant’s family home, which Cecil organised in the summer of 1927. Next to it is a large portrait of Stephen Tennant, brightest of the Bright Young Things.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing the big portrait of a young Stephen Tennant

It’s in this room that the home movie is showing. It was made at Weirbridge Cottage near Savay Farm, Denham, in Buckinghamshire, the country home of the Mosley family and featured Bright Young Things such as Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman, Georgia Sitwell, John Strachey, and the ubiquitous Tennant.

The point is Beaton’s ambition and determination. His parents were affluent enough to send him to private school and Cambridge but the rest was up to him and so he became a networker of genius. He managed to be taken up by all the important cultural circles of the day, namely: 1) Lady Ottoline Morell, the famous hostess of artists and writers at her country house, Garsington Manor, 2) the Sitwells, led by the poetess Edith Sitwell.

Charming, clever, charismatic, ambitious, talented, Beaton made friends and contacts wherever he went and people were flattered to be photographed by him. So in this room are photos of Lady Ottoline and some of her circle, of Edith and her brothers Sacheverell and Osbert. He is quoted as saying he learned an immense amount about posh upper-class manners and taste from his stays at Sacheverell’s country house at Weston Hall, Northamptonshire. Study, copy, rise.

Originally taken for the larks, Beaton’s photographs of Tennant and his circle now have considerable historical value, being considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties.

What comes over from all these wonderful black-and-white shots is the extent to which modernist art had been assimilated into the culture, especially in the 1920s. The tranquil rural settings of the Watteau homages are the exceptions because most of the photos are highly stylised interiors, taken against often striking Art Deco backgrounds, which make the photos works of art in themselves, as in the striking polka dot backdrop for Princess Emeline De Broglie, above. Here’s an installation view showing half a dozen of his wonderfully stylised 1920s and ’30s portraits. Note the striking modernist backdrops, the lovely outfits and the dramatic poses.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery

One modernist technique he used to dramatic effect was deploying multiple exposures. There are one or two examples here, although not the famous masterpiece, his portrait of Nancy Cunard.

Cecil’s self-creation

Part of Beaton’s ambition to get into the best social and artistic circles of the day was the drive to invent himself, to curate, mould and promote his own image. One result was that, over the years, a huge number of photos were taken of Beaton himself, a large number of artful self portraits but also portraits by other snappers, especially in his post-war celebrity period. The curators boast that the National Portrait Gallery alone holds 360 portraits of Beaton, by some of the most celebrated practitioners ranging from Man Ray to Richard Avedon, Dorothy Wilding to David Bailey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Arnold Newman. And so the exhibition includes photos of:

  • Cecil play-acting as King Cnut
  • Cecil outside the Excelsior Hotel, Venice
  • Cecil in Room 1806 at the Ambassador Hotel, New York
  • Cecil dressed up as the popular novelist Elinor Glyn
  • Cecil on the Menai Suspension Bridge
  • Cecil in RAF photographer’s uniform, the Western Desert
  • Cecil and Truman Capote in Tangier
  • Cecil and Audrey Hepburn on the set of My Fair Lady
  • Cecil looking grand in a cloak by the great American photographer Irving Penn in 1950

And many more.

Cecil’s stagings

I thought the single most important piece of information in the exhibition was the curators’ own observation that Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer. Instead, he focused on staging a compelling model or scene.

At school, university and after there’s plenty of evidence that he loved the theatre, loved staging plays and performances (the home movie, the Watteau series), loved not just acting in them but costume and set designing. Indeed, it was not just photography alone but his ability to make designs for the charity galas staged by fashionable London society, which boosted his reputation among the rich and titled. Here’s an installation view showing three of his photo portraits from a 1930s charity ball, which demonstrate just how elaborate these settings could be, almost dwarfing the human subjects. Note the mad profusion of flowers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery (photo by the author)

Once this talent for dressing a set is explained you see it everywhere. We are told that Beaton owned a couple of trunks full of props and spent a lot of time dressing and arranging the set or backdrop before he got around to the person or model to be shot. In so many of the shots it’s the dress and costume the sitter is wearing (this is fashion, after all) that has a lot to do with it – but what made it so Beaton would be the elaborateness or artfulness of the backdrops.

And so this is what a lot of the photos here consist of: classic debutante and society shots from the ’20s and ’30s – tall, elegant ladies in stunningly beautiful dresses, against stylishly imaginative backdrops. Here’s a photo which demonstrates both his flair for self-presentation and an example of his elaborate and stylish backdrops, in a self-portrait from the 1930s. See what I mean by ornate and elaborate backdrops. And flowers. Lots of cut flowers.

Cecil Beaton (c.1935) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

The sources of Cecil’s style

Almost entirely self-taught, Beaton established a highly distinctive photographic style which combined 1) Edwardian stage portraiture, 2) hints of contemporary European surrealism, 3) the more modernist approach of the great American photographers of the era, all filtered through 4) a pointedly English sensibility. The more I looked the more this ‘English sensibility’ could be summarised as lots of flowers.

Once you’ve recognised these elements, you can see how the mix varied in different shots or periods. For example, the portraits of his arty friends (the BYTs, the Sitwells) use a European modernist sensibility, all Art Deco lines and geometric backdrops, whereas the debutante balls are all English roses (lots and lots of roses). When, in the 1950s, he did Hollywood film stars, there are a few staged settings but most are shot in a more American, democratic, unstaged way. The famous portraits of Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe are all about capturing (supposedly) unstaged and natural moments.

Elizabeth Taylor by Cecil Beaton (1955) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Reflecting on this, you realise that being invited to do the costume and set design for the Broadway musical, and then for the movie version, of ‘My Fair Lady’ was a dream come true for Beaton, because it is a costume drama, a period piece, set in his beloved Edwardian era, but heightened and stylised through a 20th century sensibility. The outfit and backdrop in the photo below, for instance. They have the feel and apparent shape of an Edwardian outfit, but the details of the dress design, and especially the receding square of the backdrop, owe more to the 1960s Op Art of Bridget Riley than the 1900s world of Edward Elgar.

Audrey Hepburn in costume for ‘My Fair Lady’ by Cecil Beaton (1963) The Cecil Beaton Archive, London

Beaton and British Vogue

Cecil managed to sell his first photo to British Vogue while still an undergraduate and signed a contract with them in 1927. For the next decade he worked as a staff photographer for Vogue and the core of the exhibition is lots of work from this period. This includes not just fashion shoots but illustrations and covers.

Regarding the illustrations, about half a dozen are on show here, all of them are good, and some of them are sublime. Obviously it’s fashion with its eternal body fascism, so all the women are immensely tall with unfeasibly long necks but, if you enter that world, those are the rules.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing one of Beaton’s many fashion drawings: note the extreme thinness and elongation of the models;  in fashion, everything changes and yet nothing changes

Vogue covers

More light is shed on Beaton’s strengths and weaknesses in the matter of magazine covers. You’d have expected the young genius to have supplemented his elaborate fashion shoots with umpteen cover shoots for Vogue but, surprisingly, no. Very few of his classic shots made it onto the cover of Vogue. This was, apparently, because he was too opinionated to submit to the requirements of art directors who needed to arrange images to have lots of text imposed over them. Cecil wouldn’t play ball. So surprisingly few covers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ showing the display case of holding some of his (relatively few) magazine covers (photo by the author)

Cecil’s antisemitism

Then disaster struck. In 1937, for reasons he could not immediately explain, as he put the finishing touches to a finely-detailed decorative border to a double-page illustration for Vogue, Beaton added in tiny writing an antisemitic slur – basically, he used the k word. Though almost microscopic, it did not go unnoticed. 130,000 copies of the early February 1938 edition were pulped as the magazine’s editors fielded a backlash from  advertisers who threatened a boycott. Condé Nast forced Beaton’s resignation from Vogue. Beaton’s humiliation was sudden and total. Then again, this is the world of fashion. Two years later, partially rehabilitated by the seriousness of his war photography (see below), Vogue rehired him.

The Royals

In 1939, much to his own surprise, Beaton was invited to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth, wife of the reigning monarch, George VI. Only two years earlier he had potentially alienated the Royals by doing portraits of the two figures at the heart of the scandal which rocked the family, the 1936 Abdication Crisis, namely Edward Prince of Wales and the American divorcee he fell in love with, Wallis Simpson. His 1937 portraits of them are here and very impressive, too, especially Wallis in a striking black and white Schiaparelli jacket.

But despite having taken stylish photos of the Royals’ enemy, he was now invited into the heart of the establishment, to take photos of the loyal Royals, and this was to open up a whole new aspect of his career. Queen Elizabeth (who was to become the Queen Mother) was charming, her husband mild and unassuming, and he took various sets of them. But over the  next decade or more it was their daughter, the young Princess Elizabeth, who stole the show, who emerged from girlhood into young maturity and be captured in a series of photoshoots. Beaton was the official photographer for her coronation (2 June 1953), and captured the growth of her young family. There’s a great shot of her with the toddler Prince Charles.

Meanwhile, her sister, the more fashionable and flirtatious Princess Margaret, was also given the Beaton treatment, but in a more stylish and elegant manner than her more homely sister. Beaton’s long association with the Royals, during which he helped to mould their public image, has been the subject of more than one exhibition and numerous books.

War photographer

If Beaton’s reputation was dented by the antisemitism scandal, it was in part rehabilitated by the advent of war in September 1939. He was recruited into the Ministry of Information and tasked with creating propaganda photos. At first these focused on the Home Front, especially during the Battle of Britain (10 July until 31 October 1940) and the Blitz (7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941). This section of the show features a fashionably dressed young woman set against a completely bombed-out London building.

But the star of the section is the iconic photo Beaton took of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet joined the war, but images like this did much to create the climate of public opinion in the States favourable to lending Britain arms and materiel.

The Men Who Fly Planes by Cecil Beaton (1941) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

I haven’t really brought out Beaton’s work rate. You don’t become the leading fashion photographer of your age by accident. It took a lot of hard work, ambition and commitment, honing your craft, maintaining contacts and delivering the goods. And the point of mentioning this now is that when the war came, Beaton applied the same commitment and work rate to his war work. At first on the domestic subjects of the Blitz and air battle but, once it was possible, he travelled beyond Britain to other theatres of war, to document all aspects of the war effort: from the shipyards of Tyneside to the Middle East and then the Far East to record the war against Japan.

In total Beaton took some 7,000 photographs for the Ministry of Information covering all aspects of the Second World War, and produced an impressive ten books with titles like ‘History Under Fire’ and ‘Air of Glory’. Like so many other aspects of Beaton’s career this one, too, has been the subject of an exhibition, held, appropriately enough, at the Imperial War Museum.

So much so that I wondered: why is there a whole section devoted to Beaton’s war photography in an exhibition about fashion?

Two country homes: Ashcombe and Reddish

The exhibition takes another digression away from purely fashion shoots to devote a room to Beaton’s two homes. From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. It was a small, elegant house, undisturbed for years and Beaton lavished years of care, decorating and adorning it with tasteful theatricality, and it became a venue for hosting his many friends in the arts.

Unfortunately, when the lease expired in 1945 it couldn’t be renewed, so he was bereft for a few years. Then, in 1947, he discovered Reddish House, a ‘miniature Queen Anne jewel-box of a house’, set in a couple of acres of gardens, a few miles east of the village of Broad Chalke.

Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings. Once again, it became a venue for visitors, friends and celebrities, not least his sometime inamorata, Greta Garbo (the very improbable affair between Beaton and Garbo lasted from 1946 to 1960). Grand personages for a quiet English backwater. Beaton remained at the house until his death in 1980 and is buried in the parish church graveyard.

State and film design

In Britain, the end of the war saw a continuation of rationing and austerity. The most obvious change in Beaton’s world was the advent of colour photography. During the 1930s colour image making was a labour-intensive exercise and Beaton wasn’t fond of it. Technological advancements in colour reproduction had been led by The Condé Nast Publications at its state-of-the-art printing works outside New York so that Vogue was at the cutting edge. The curators claim that Beaton made some of his most
impressive fashion photographs in colour, usually within his trademark stylised format. Frankly, I’m not so sure.

The room of post-war colour photos seemed to me by far the weakest. His colour photos lack the style, precision and thrilling modernity of the black and white ones. I can think of no better way of saying it than that the subjects in the 1920s and ’30s black-and-white images look like flawless gods and legends whereas the people in his colour photos look like people, freckles and skin blemishes and all. Here’s one of his solo colour portraits from just after the war. Nicely staged and lit and everything, but… plain. Amazing dress, lovely little bouquets etc… But lacking any oomph.

At the Tuxedo Ball (Nancy Harris) by Cecil Beaton (1946) The Condé Nast Archive, New York

He’s a lot better when he can arrange his figures into the kind of idealised, stylised Edwardian drawing room ambience which became his post-war brand, as here, less close-up, more stylised. Like a set design.

Worldly Colour (Charles James evening dresses) by Cecil Beaton (1948) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Designer for stage and screen

Possibly this is why his post-war career took a detour away from photography back towards his first love of the stage, costumes and theatrical design. Immediately after the war, in 1946, he designed sets, costumes and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which he also acted. Eight years later, in 1956, he won plaudits for the costumes he designed for Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist and librettist) and Frederick Loewe (composer)’s musical play ‘My Fair Lady’. The association led to the invitation to be designer to the Lerner and Loewe film musical, ‘Gigi’, in 1958. And then, the climax of his career, to design costumes for the award-winning movie version of the play, ‘My Fair Lady’, released in 1964. Astonishingly, Beaton won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for both these movies.

The last room in the exhibition is devoted to Beaton’s designs for and photos of the stars of ‘My Fair Lady’, not least a montage of shots of the incomparable Audrey Hepburn, along with a couple of the original star of the stage production, Rex Harrison, and the young actress who made the part onstage but was dropped in favour of Hepburn, Julie Andrews (note the roses).

Celebrities

As mentioned, before the war it’s mostly debutante and fashion photos of the 1920s and ’30s are of people we’ve never heard of (apart from the Royals). It’s after the war, when he went to work in America, that Beaton started shooting celebrity actors and performers in large numbers. Thus the exhibition includes memorable portraits of:

  • John Wayne
  • Gary Cooper
  • Fred Astaire
  • Katherine Hepburn
  • Buster Keaton
  • Johnny Weismuller
  • Marlon Brando
  • Yul Brynner
  • Joan Crawford
  • Elizabeth Taylor
  • Marilyn Monroe

Artists:

  • Salvador and Gala Dali
  • Lucien Freud
  • Francis Bacon

Comments

1. Absence of analysis

Exhibition curator Robin Muir is quoted as saying ‘Beaton’s impact spans the worlds of fashion, photography and design.’ OK. Why? How? Explain what lasting impact he had on 1) fashion, 2) photography, 3) design. What, exactly, were his, say, three major innovations in photography?

I was surprised at the lack of analysis of any of this. Blank assertion a-plenty – he was ‘one of the leading visionary forces of the British twentieth century’, he ‘made a lasting contribution to the artistic lives of New York, Paris and Hollywood’ and so on. Yes, but how exactly? In what way did he ‘mould the visual style between the wars’? Why exactly was he called ‘the King of Vogue’? What was it about his compositions or lighting, his arrangement of models and so on, that defined the age?

The wall captions overflow with names of all the sitters, who they were and who they married or divorced – there’s no end of celebrity tittle-tattle, so that much of the exhibition reads like a society gossip column from a hundred years ago:

Marjorie Seely Blossom (1890-1969) divided her time between New York, Palm Beach and Biarritz, where she cultivated a much-admired rose garden. In a letter to Beaton, Diana Vreeland praised Mrs Wilson as ‘the most divinely beautiful woman that ever was’.

Or:

Lady Mendl, the former Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950), was married late in life and to the surprise of friends, to Sir Charles Mendl, press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. They kept separate
residences but entertained together. An interior decorator of influence, Lady Mendl sits in the circular hall of her Paris home in a blue taffeta dress by Mainbocher. Beaton considered her ‘a woman of unquenchable vitality… a living factory of chic.’

There’s hundreds of miles of this stuff. But insights into the precise nature of Beaton’s innovations and discoveries, what his look consisted of and why it was so influential, or indeed an outline of the main developments in fashion during the 1920s and ’30s – disappointingly little.

2. Comparison with Lee Miller

It’s a happy coincidence that the Beaton exhibition (ends January 2026) is running in parallel with Tate Britain’s exhibition of another pioneering twentieth century photographer, Lee Miller (running until February 2026).

In a nutshell, I think Miller is incomparably the greater photographer and artist. While Beaton had a good eye as a photographer, Lee was a genius. Presumably the Beaton has been carefully curated to be the best of the best and so I was very surprised that quite a few of the photos were actually poor. Some seemed to fail the elementary test of being in focus. Many of the post-war colour images seemed to me clumsy and graceless.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery showing four of Beaton’s colour photos from the 1940s

Many of the debutante photos and, of course, the Royal portraits, are nice. Nicely composed, chaste and demure, cascades of roses complementing billowing dresses etc. I take the point that the style he developed took a lot of effort and flair and so on but they are all, essentially, conservative, in subject matter (all those posh debutantes) and feel and style. Beaton adapted the feeblest British aftershocks of surrealism into his vision, tame and well mannered.

By contrast, Miller went to the heart of the Parisian avant-garde, tracking down and buttonholing Man Ray and forcing herself to become his collaborator and lover. With him she developed dazzling new ways of seeing and using photography (notably the famous solarising technique). The nudes she did in the studio with Man Ray invented new types of beauty, took the concept of the nude to new places. Her surrealist shots of Paris street scenes are inspired. Her war photography was inspired. She not only had a dazzlingly good eye but was brave in the face of actual combat in a way most of us can’t imagine.

For all that Beaton is photographed smiling and larking around, his humour comes over very little in his actual work, whereas Lee Miller’s quirky surreal take on the world comes over in scores of her images.

Maybe Beaton’s concoction from various elements of a sort of modernised Edwardian elegance for the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s was very influential in his day, in fact for a generation – but it is, all of it, tame and contained and good mannered. While Miller blew the lid off photography not once but several times, with the searing intensity of genius.

I know they come from different worlds and are doing different things. ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ is a very good, very interesting and very entertaining exhibition. But almost anything by Lee Miller blows it out of the water.

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Posted by Simon on November 8, 2025

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Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

This is a lovely exhibition, the first major UK exhibition of the leading French Impressionist Berthe Morisot’s work since 1950, but it’s also much more than that.

At the Ball by Berthe Morisot (1875) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

It is also a sustained comparison of Morisot’s work with the 18th century artists she knew and loved, which means that about a third of the paintings on display (about 15 out of a total 45 or so) are not by Morisot at all, but by eighteenth century classics, such as Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher and, surprisingly, the Brits Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.

A collaboration

How did this come about? Well, the Musée Marmottan Monet is ‘the world’s leading research centre for the work of Berthe Morisot’ and it turns out that Morisot was very influenced by eighteenth century art – the French eighteenth century work of Fragonard and Watteau and Boucher, but also the English eighteenth century art which she saw on her honeymoon to England in 1875.

And Dulwich Picture Gallery houses a celebrated collection of 18th century painting. So this exhibition is by way of being a collaboration between these two galleries – The Musée Marmottan Monet providing nine key examples of Morisot’s work (along with prime examples from international collections) and these are then juxtaposed with French and English eighteenth century paintings from the Dulwich collection and elsewhere – with the aim of demonstrating Morisot’s debt to the previous century, both in subject matter and aspects of her painting style.

Berthe Morisot potted biography

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (1841 to 1895) was a French painter and a founding member of Impressionism. In 1864, she exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the ‘rejected’ Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, a show which included Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. Morisot went on to participate prominently in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 (she missed one in 1878, having just given birth to her daughter, Julie). In 1894 the art critic Gustave Geffroy as one of ‘les trois grandes dames’ of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.

Morisot was well connected. She came from an affluent family who secured her painting lessons, first copying works in the Louvre, and then as a pupil to landscape painter Camille Corot, who taught her to make swift outdoor sketches.

She married Eugène Manet, brother of her friend and colleague Édouard Manet. Her sister, Edma, was also a painter. The Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé was a family friend. She was a member of the haut bohemien.

Room one

The exhibition is in four rooms. The first room contains eight paintings, designed partly to give you an introduction to her light and airy style, but almost all of the captions also draw attention to the fact that, even at the time, many critics spotted her closeness in spirit to eighteenth century painting.

Installation view of Room 1 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

What they meant was that something in the lightness and airiness of her style, something in the domestic intimacy of her subjects (almost entirely women), and even in her use of shades of white and silver, related directly back to the mood and tone of French Rococo painting.

‘Woman at her Toilette’ by Berthe Morisot (1875 to 1880). Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Stickney Fund

Take ‘Woman at her Toilette’. To quote the curators:

With its silvery palette and fluent brushwork, the painting appears as ephemeral as a mirror reflection. Reviewing it at the Fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, art critic Paul Mantz noted: ‘everything floats, nothing is formulated […] there is here a finesse like that found in Fragonard.’

Or:

‘The genius of the eighteenth century, but not its debauchery, lives again in these familiar and select images, which are animated by a kind of airy voluptuousness.’ (Henri Focillon)

Or take the painting at the start of this review, ‘At the Ball’. The woman in evening dress is holding an eighteenth-century fan, opened to display a picture-within-the-picture, a scene of outdoor courtship known as a fête galante, a genre invented by the eighteenth-century artist Watteau. (The fan belonged to Morisot and is included in the exhibition so we can admire its civilised 18th century style.)

Morisot was fond of making this kind of allusion to eighteenth-century visual culture and the connection proved attractive to collectors. The curators tell us that Rococo art had gone into a long period of neglect after the French Revolution but that, in Morisot’s generation, it underwent a revival. Exhibitions reintroduced eighteenth-century French art to the public and the Louvre opened new rooms devoted to the era.

So when Renoir declared her ‘the last elegant and “feminine” artist that we have had since Fragonard’ and Paul Girard, reviewing her summary exhibition in 1896 commented that her work was ‘the eighteenth century modernised’, it showed that she was very much on trend, and it was reflected in her sales. ‘At the Ball’ was bought from the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876 by art collector Georges de Bellio, to complement his existing collection of eighteenth-century art, and many of her works were sold to collectors with similar tastes.

Room two

The second room has the highest proportion of non-Morisot to Morisot, 8 or so works by other artists to her four. This is the room where the curators show a number of eighteenth century works and explore Morisot’s relationship to them. This turns out to be quite complicated, in the sense that she had a multi-levelled relationship with the artists of the preceding century, which evolved over time.

Engaging the classics

In her late teens and early twenties she had undergone supervised training which consisted of copying classic works at the Louvre. Over 20 years later, she returned to the Louvre to engage with the classics, no longer copying them but translating them into her own, loose, rough, late-impressionist style.

In her forties and fifties, Morisot engaged directly with grand mythological paintings in museum collections, translating elements of their compositions into her own Impressionist language. Unlike the copies that formed part of her own early training, these are original interpretations by a confident, mature artist.

Thus the exhibition shows us (a photo of) Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé by the great Rococo painter François Boucher:

‘Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé’ by François Boucher (1750)

And then shows us Morisot’s interpretation or translation or reinvention of the two embracing young women at the bottom left of the painting into her own hazy, light, unfinished style:

‘Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher’ by Berthe Morisot (1892) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Now this raises all kinds of questions. On the face of it, I prefer the Boucher, as I consistently preferred all the 18h century originals to Morisot’s ‘interpretations’ when they were laid side by side. There’s more depth, more perspective, more (wonderful) painting technique, more detail and more visual pleasure to be had by the works by Fragonard, Boucher and Watteau on show here. They look and feel like the luxury objects they were intended to be.

And yet, Morisot’s work is doing something different: its looseness, its rough finish, its lack of interest in realistic perspective or twinkly detail are the result of something else. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the technique, namely the long, blunt, wide brushstrokes which can be seen in the green reeds. (And it’s fascinating to learn that Monet very much liked this feature of Morisot’s later style, and went on to use a similar combination of short and longer sinewy brushstrokes and pastel colouring in his paintings of water lilies.)

But, arguably, there’s also a psychological dimension at play. In the Boucher work, the embracing women are yet more examples of the kind of sumptuous sensuality which floods the painting. In Morisot’s version they’re still naked, and we can see the outlines of their bodies, and yet these bodies are being dissolved into or drowned or clambered over by the powerful green reeds, powerful green reeds which, on the left, swirl and curve, leading the viewer’s eyes into a background which isn’t magically alluring but is more unadorned and bleak. Humanless and troubling.

The female gaze

Something similar can be said of another direct comparison the show gives us. First, look at this characteristically sensual and saucy painting by Fragonard of a woman reclining, all pink nipples and soft porn confection:

‘Young Woman Sleeping’ by François Boucher. Fondation Jacquemart-André – Institut de France, Domaine de Chaalis, Fontaine- Chaalis

Pretty obviously this painting, and this entire genre of painting, was designed to please and titillate its male audience with what T.S. Eliot called the ‘promise of pneumatic bliss’. And here is Morisot’s reinterpretation:

‘Resting’ by Berthe Morisot (1892) Private Collection

Same subject i.e. head and shoulders of a topless young woman reclining on an ornamental sofa or bed and yet…the Morisot comes from a different world, both artistically and psychologically. On the painterly level, the Bouchard buries the outlines of the subject in a realistic depiction i.e. you see more or less what you would see in real life, maybe a little Photoshopped and improved, but the outlines are soft a gentle.

On the contrary, the Morisot makes a point of emphasising outlines. Note the strong green lines shaping her hair, particularly as it tumbles onto her shoulder, the outline of her right shoulder against the pillow, the outlines of her right boob and forearm and left handing resting on it.

This painting isn’t interested in realism; it is making a statement about the artificiality of painting itself. In this respect, several of her later (this is from 1892) works reminded me of Gauguin, who had long ago ceased bothering about ‘realism’ and become interested in simplifying patterns and designs using heavy outlines, shapes which refer back to objects in the real world but take them a long way towards a kind of primitive abstraction.

Morisot isn’t Gauguin, but I thought some of her later works had moved just as far beyond impressionism, but in her own distinctive way. Another vivid example is ‘Julie Manet and her Greyhound Laertes’ from right at the end of her life (1893 – she died in 1895)

The straight-on face and the black, very loosely painted dress, reminded me of Edvard Munch more than Renoir or the other classic-era impressionists.

And this brings me to the other aspect of the work, which is its psychological impact. The Bouchard woman, a sleek airbrushed imago, has been painted for male viewing pleasure. The Morisot picture for other reasons altogether. As discussed, it is, on one level, an exercise in painterly technique, in exploring the world beyond pure realism. But on a psychological level it is just as complex. This woman doesn’t exist to give any man pleasure. This isn’t painted for the controlling male gaze. She comes across as a real individual, with idiosyncratic hair, colouring, non-male-fantasy boobs; like a painting of a woman who happens not to be wearing a top.

And, as well, there is some kind of power radiating from t, a sense of psychological depth. She reminds me of the heroines of late Victorian fiction, of Hardy or Zola or Henry James, of women whose every transient thought and emotion and response is annotated and analysed in vertiginous detail over three or four hundred pages novels.

There are a lot of paintings of women in the exhibition but, in my opinion, there is quite a big gulf between Morisot’s pretty-pretty, dressed-up Victorian women from the 1870s and 1880s, which are often variation on Renoir’s delightful dancing ladies – and these later depictions, which are something altogether different. They anticipate the much blunter honesty and psychological complexity of much early twentieth century portraiture.

Working in pastel

Room three also contains a useful contrast in the medium of pastel. From the 18th century we have a stunningly beautiful portrait of an unknown man by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. This is the kind of work that has to be seen in the flesh to be appreciated. A reproduction like this flattens and smooths it out. In the flesh you can see the amazing amount of work that’s gone into the pastelwork, for example the way repeated layerings of broad blue crayon create a rich sensual impression like you could reach out and touch it, whereas, the wall label tells us, the intricate detail of his neckerchief was achieved with a fine-nibbed pen. It looks pretty good in this reproduction, but it’s a wonder to stand in front of.

Portrait of a Man, Thought to be Louis Journu, Known as Montagny by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1757 to 1758)

And so, placed next to it is a very good pastel portrait of her daughter Julie by Morisot:

Girl carrying a basket by Berthe Morisot (1891)

Again, the Morisot doesn’t have the astonishing finish or visual depth of the Perronneau. And yet, in its very sketchiness, it indicates an infinitely more modern consciousness, a proto-modern sensibility made of gaps and fragments, the strange ellipses and leaps of consciousness which modernist literature was about to start exploring about a decade later (I’m thinking about the earliest works of Kafka and Joyce).

The French eighteenth century

So, as mentioned above, the exhibition is worth visiting to see not just works by Morisot, but also (an admittedly small) number of works by French eighteenth century masters. There’s a pretty poor portrait of a young girl by Fragonard but a dazzling work by Watteau:

Les Plaisirs du bal by Antoine Watteau (1715 to 1717) Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery

Completely different in style from those guy’s frothy confections and commedia dell’arte whimsy, there’s a lovely piece by the master of eighteenth century realism, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Scullery Maid, a characteristically humble domestic scene of a serving maid getting eggs out of a jug surrounded by beautifully depicted bowls and servant-level bric-a-brac.

This leads off in another direction because it turns out that Morisot’s sister, Edma, was also an artist and she is represented here by just one work, a beautiful landscape in the manner of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot who both girls had studied under. These are all delights.

Landscape by Edma Morisot (1860s) D. and J. Waller

The English connection

But back to the English. The exhibition explains that Morisot spent her honeymoon (with Manet’s brother, Eugène) on a trip which took in the joys of the Isle of Wight and then London. In London she saw the huge collection amassed by Sir Richard Wallace, Marquess of Hertford, which has been preserved for the nation as the Wallace Collection.

It was here that she was introduced to the works of 18th century English masters such as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney. The exhibition takes a little detour to explain the different styles of these three men, and discuss some key works by each of them, and then how their styles or motifs found their way into Morisot’s work.

Gainsborough is the most obviously close to Morisot because of his light, feathery, sketchy approach, which drew criticism from the more grand and finished Reynolds, yet was precisely the quality that attracted the quick, sketchy Frenchwoman.

Installation view of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, setting ‘Mrs Mary Robinson’ by George Romney (1781, on the left) against ‘Winter, or Woman with a Muff’ by Berthe Morisot (1880)

Summary

Not all of Morisot’s work is great. The fourth and final room contains only works by her and I have to admit I didn’t like most of them.

Installation view of Room 4 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Worthy depictions of domestic interiors, of her growing daughter, intimate portraits of women outside in the Bois de Boulogne or out in a boat or resting on divans (clearly a full-time occupation for many Victorian ladies), I often found their style either washed-out (several of the supposedly sweet and intimate studies of her daughter gave her such a yellow-pale face she looked like a corpse, for example, ‘Children with a basin‘) or so quick and sketchy as to feel amateurish.

Very good amateurish, but in many of her paintings the multiple clumsinesses wherever I looked just stopped me really enjoying them, giving in, surrendering, saying Yes.

‘Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight’ by Berthe Morisot (1885) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

By contrast, I was enraptured by almost all the eighteenth century works (except for the ghastly, ugly Fragonard in room one), by her sister’s one work, and also by the massive work by a painter I haven’t mentioned yet, her contemporary James Tissot (The Ball on Shipboard), included because Tissot moved from Paris to London and made a great success of his career, so much so that, on her honeymoon trip, Morisot seriously considered doing the same and moving to London.

Even the 18th century ‘cartoons’ or preliminary sketches for big works like by Boucher (‘Vulcan’s Forge) delighted and enchanted with a depth and finish and wonderful technique, in a way that most of the Morisot didn’t.

For this reason I hardly think it the scandal of the century that Morisot isn’t as well known as many of the other impressionists. To be blunt, I don’t think she’s as good. Or definitely not on the strength of the works presented here, a handful of which are really good, some are pretty good, and some are positively poor.

But then again, it depends on your aesthetic. Did my general preference for the 18th century works indicate that I’m a peasant, a man of poor taste, a liker of pretty pictures and chocolate box art, who doesn’t appreciate more demanding (and hardly that demanding) art?

Here’s a test. Here’s the bold, take-no-prisoners self-portrait which the curators open the show with.

Self-portrait by Berthe Morisot (1885) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

I get that she’s a strong independent woman, and that this comes over not only in the directness of her gaze but in the super-confidence with which she didn’t finish it. The French have an expression, ‘je-m’en-foutisme’, which translates as ‘I don’t give a damn-ism’ (or ruder, four-letter equivalents).

So, is the scrappy finish and the lack of immediate visual appeal outweighed by the strength of character and psychological depth of a painting like this? Your answer will determine whether you like Morisot, or at least the selection of 30 or so Morisot paintings to be found in this small but incredibly stimulating and hugely enjoyable exhibition.

The merch

I’ve made the point in previous reviews of Impressionist exhibitions, but one reason for the ongoing popularity of the Impressionists is simply that their paintings transfer so well onto posters and mugs and tea towels and jigsaws and the whole world of merchandise. Painting which, large and in the flesh feel half finished and scrappy, when reduced to the size of a coffee cup or tea tray, suddenly look finished, light and attractive. Never ceases to amaze me. As you can see from the full range of Morisot merchandise on sale at the Dulwich Picture Gallery shop:

The promotional video

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by Simon on July 28, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 28, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/28/berthe-morisot-shaping-impressionism-dulwich-picture-gallery/

Rubens and his Legacy @ The Royal Academy

This is a large exhibition in terms of number of items, but a vast one in terms of scope. It sets out to track the legacy of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577 to 1640), one of the most influential of all western artists, and makes large claims for his impact on a wide range of genres and painters in every European country.

As it is setting out to demonstrate his impact and legacy, the majority of the pictures (and sketches and engravings) in the exhibition are not by Rubens; in some of the rooms it feels like only 3 or 4 out of 20 items are by Peter Paul (PP). Most of them are by the contemporaries or later artists who followed in his footsteps. It might be possible to misread the posters and publicity and feel a bit cheated…

Nonetheless, as the exhibition proceeds, its curators’ intentions are to some extent fulfilled, insofar as you do start to genuinely see Rubens’s influence – in composition and colour and treatment – in a growing number of the paintings by other artists. You begin to have an intimidating sense of the breadth and depth of his legacy. (And, from the enjoyment point of view, many of the works by other artists are masterpieces in their own right, a pleasure to see whatever the context.)

The audioguide (26 items, 50 minutes) claims that without Rubens, no rococo, no romanticism, no impressionism. Bold claim: is it justified?

Poetry

The exhibition is divided into six themes. By ‘poetry’, the curators mean landscape. Early on the commentary makes an amusing statement of national stereotypes. Apparently, English painters took from Rubens his techniques in landscape, the French were interested in his treatment of love and eroticism, the Spanish copied his Counter-Reformation religious drama, and Germans liked the virility and pathos of his paintings. Each conforming to type, then.

The exhibition starts with ‘the English theme’, Rubens’s treatment of landscape. We are shown a Rubens landscape with carters and are told that the left side of the picture is in moonlight, the right side in sunlight, impossible in reality, but adding drama to an otherwise mundane scene. Near it the curators hang similar subjects by the English landscapists Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, among others – notably Constable’s full-size oil sketch for The Haywain. Rubens dramatised landscape, the moonlight-sunlight being an example. Another popular one was showing a landscape just after a rainstorm has ended, leaving a brilliant rainbow behind. There’s a Rubens showing just such a post-storm rainbow  and then a number of examples showing how English artists copied him. Constable, in particular, explicitly praised Rubens composition and colour in his notebooks. (Apparently Constable is famous for his use of red and the commentary says he copied this from Rubens). The section on Constable reinforced the impression gained from the recent Constable exhibition of how artful and calculating an artist he was.

Rubens to one side, I enjoyed many of the works by other artists on show in this room, including a wonderful sketch by Gainsborough, The Harvest Wagon, notable for its handling of the human figures, a cartoon, Daumier-like precision of shape and line and action. Also  very English  for its modesty.

The Garden of Love

Like many of Rubens’ larger paintings, the hugely influential Garden of Love is drenched in allegory and classical models: the elaborate architecture, the flying putti, the statue of Jove, queen of the gods, squeezing water from her ample breasts. Beneath them, in their shade and protection, these flirting mortals are featuring in one of the first ever scenes of contemporary people enjoying leisure time outdoors. Previously it was gods or military heroes or landscapes with peasants. Here are real people  albeit well-off people – but still real contemporaries, wearing contemporary costume, flirting and partying in the open air.

Peter Paul Rubens The Garden of Love, c. 1633 Oil on canvas, 199 x 286 cm Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid Photo c. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado

The Garden of Love by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1633) Museo Nacional del Prado. Madrid

This painting bewitched the French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 to 1721) who went on to develop his own style of light-hearted love scenes set outdoors. The argument goes: Rubens invented Watteau who invented the fetes galantes, inaugurating the age of rococo art in France.

More examples of Rubens, such as Chateau In A Park, are set against numerous sketches and oil paintings by Watteau, including the wonderful La Surprise, as well as works by other 18th century rococo painters such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Jean-Antoine Watteau La Surprise: A Couple Embracing While a Figure Dressed as mezzetin Tunes a Guitar, 1718-19 Oil on panel, 36.3 x 28.2 cm Private Collection Photo: Private Collection

La Surprise: A Couple Embracing While a Figure Dressed as mezzetin Tunes a Guitar by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1718 to 1719) Private Collection

Elegance

By which the curators mean portraiture. Rubens spent four years in Genoa (then a city made rich by trade in silks and fabrics) painting the wives of the richest bankers and merchants. The largest example of this period is the portrait of Marchesa Maria Grimaldi, and Her Dwarf – an ugly painting but, wow, the detailing of the gold cloth of her dress is amazing and lustrous in reality (reproductions completely fail to capture it). Note the classical columns (aren’t I classy) and the rich velvet curtain (aren’t I rich) and the bounding little dog (aren’t I sensitive).

The most direct influence of Rubens’s portrait style was on Anthony van Dyck, child prodigy and Rubens’s pupil, working directly under him in Antwerp before himself travelling to Genoa to make money. Van Dyck toned Rubens down, his portraits are cooler, more detached. In the Genoese Noblewoman and her Son, we have the classical architecture in the background and the luxury curtain (aren’t I cultured and rich) but the sitter is side on to the viewer, that much more self-contained, less revealing (aren’t I aloof). The boy is staring at us with the look of command and authority he is destined to grow into, and the dog is looking up at his future master. The thing is dripping with multiple layers of power and authority.

Sir Anthony Van Dyck A Genoese Noblewoman and Her Son, c. 1626 Oil on canvas, 191.5 x 139.5 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection, 1942.9.91 Photo Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

A Genoese Noblewoman and Her Son by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (c. 1626) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Widener Collection

Van Dyck came to the court of Charles I (generally thought to have been the most genuinely cultivated of all British monarchs and who was rewarded for it by having his head cut off) and was knighted for his services to the crown and aristocracy. Van Dyck forged an image of Charles as the tall (he was short), wise (he was stupid), and authoritative (he alienated everyone who ever served him) ruler that he wasn’t.

The commentary made the striking claim that van Dyck invented the English gentleman which, if you’re familiar with his portraits of the English aristocracy, is at least plausible.

Back with PP, the exhibition is making the claim that Rubens is the father of the grand British portrait, and sets off to prove it by placing his huge portrait with dwarf opposite a selection of equally imposing portraits of rich people by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence, portraitists to the British upper classes from the 1770s to the 1830s. The examples here – say, Elizabeth Lamb Viscountess Melbourne with her son – are very large like the Rubens originals, they keep an architectural frame and a drape, but they are less sumptuous and rich, the colour is drabber, and the background is, in line with the English fondness for landscape, a realistic slice of countryside, presumably the estate of this rich woman.

Or take Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of Mrs Arthur Annesley, a big slab of classical architecture, but with quite an extensive view over the estate on the right, and the painting dominated by sweet little darling children, appropriate to the Age of Sentiment.

Power

The previous rooms feel like they’ve been warming us up for the heart of the exhibition, two rooms dedicated to Rubens’s work as a propagandist of genius. It is staggering to be reminded all over again of his achievements completely outside the realm of art, for Rubens was also a diplomat, a spy and an antiquarian – a figure famous across Europe. Rather as with The Garden of Love, mentioned above, his achievement in political painting was to integrate classical mythology with everday reality, in this case with accurate depictions of living contemporary rulers, and to set both in a convincing space and tableau.

His masterpiece is the series of massive 24 paintings showing the career of Marie de Medicis and her husband, King Henri IV of France. A room is dedicated to a small selection of the numerous preparatory sketches Rubens made, and to an enormous screen projecting a video compilation of the finished paintings which currently hang in the Louvre. They are overwhelming, brilliant, vast, powerful in conception and in their myriad of details

Peter Paul Rubens The Triumph of Henri IV, 1630 Oil on panel, 49.5 x 83.5 cm Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1942 (42.187) Photo c. 2013. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence

The Triumph of Henri IV by Peter Paul Rubens (1630) Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Also in the same room and given the same treatment is the immense roof of the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, London, which can still be seen today. It is covered in its entirety by scenes painted by Rubens and commissioned by Charles I to depict the power and glory of his father, King James I of Britain. It, also, is a commanding series of images, though less overwhelming than the Medici ones – and its impact slightly spoiled for anyone who knows that the paintings were still not complete when Charles I was led from that very room onto a scaffold built along the first floor of the building, to be beheaded. Absolute Monarchy, English style.

Hundreds of painters copied the example Rubens set of lending mythological force and dramatic mises-en-scenes to the depiction of contemporary rulers, from the Sun King to Hitler. The results are splendid but may be the most antipathetic to English taste…

Compassion

Or at least that’s what I thought till I entered the 5th room, which is about religion. Rubens was a devout Catholic and painter to the Counter-Reformation authorities. Ah. The largest Rubens in the room is the altarpiece Christ On the Straw, in which I found all the faults I dislike about most Christian art (and which I loathed in the recent Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery) – sentimental, lachrymose, stagey, inauthentic and banal.

There were lots of copies of this image, or something like it, by numerous subsequent artists, from David Wilkie doing the Grand Tour to Vincent van Gogh (!). Maybe the only one I liked was another sketch by Gainsborough, Descent from the Cross (after Sir Peter Paul Rubens). Seems to me Gainsborough expresses compassion in the shape and flow of the composition – the agony is implied, unlike the Rubens original where the white operatic faces are white with extreme emotion, the eyes drenched with tears and turned imploringly up to an angel-infested heaven.

Violence

Hell

Along with the sentimentalism it evokes around the story of the crucifixion, Christianity is also famous for the extreme violence of much of its imagery of revenge, and the weakest room in the exhibition is devoted to these images which take their cue from Rubens’ large and vividly imagined Fall of The Damned. Shame we couldn’t see the original, which is in a church in Germany to terrify the faithful. The engravings and copies here show the delight in a multitude of grisly physical tortures which always tickle the Christian imagination (Dante’s Inferno) but not the sense of falling into the picture and joining the devilish throng which the original was presumably designed to make you feel.

Rape

The violence of the religious imagination is set by the curators next to the popular of myths and legends about the rape or abduction of women in classical mythology, which Rubens depicted repeatedly, along with his copiers and devotees v The Rape of Proserpina, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus. These compositions are stagey, operatic, full of carefully arranged violence, at the centre of which are plump women with their clothes falling off. Various reviews mention how uncomfortable the British have been with elements of Rubens’s legacy, and I personally dislike this and the religious iconography, both, for shamelessly exploiting the viewer. With a landscape I feel my aesthetic sense is being appealed to. With a painting of Mary bursting into tears or scantily clad women being abducted by musclemen in armour I feel much baser emotions are being aimed at.

The Hunt

Another room was dominated by Rubens’s very big painting of a Tiger, Lion and Leopard Hunt (1617) and around it hung works showing the way this scene v the full drama of the capture of a large, exotic, wild animal v was repeated with variations by painters like Eugène Delacroix and the Englishman Sir Edwin Landseer. It was Delacroix, apparently, who said: ‘Be inspired by Rubens, copy Rubens, look at Rubens.’

Lust

We arrive, exhausted with sensual overload, at the final room which has numerous paintings of scantily clad women being leered at, or just about to be seized by, a satyr. The women are notable for their large thighs, buttocks and bellies and relatively small breasts, as in the Pan and Syrinx of 1617.

Peter Paul Rubens Pan and Syrinx, 1617 Oil on panel, 40 x 61 cm Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel Photo: Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister/Ute Brunzel

Pan and Syrinx by Peter Paul Rubens (1617) Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel

The women are always painted as pink and light-skinned, symbolising their purity and innocence. The pans or satyrs are super-muscular figures, their sunburnt skins darkening towards their crotch, wherein lies the source of lust and the hellish pleasures which will buy their owners a one-way ticket to the Fall of Damned, mentioned above.

It was interesting to learn how Rubens used a variety of tints to create the appearance of flesh, including the use of blue or green tints to imply shadowed skin, next to unshadowed pink or white.

And it was interesting to see a roomful of works depicting the same subject by Watteau, Boucher, Renoir and Picasso – but whether this is due to Rubens’ influence or to the abiding interest in revealing the naked female body to the male artist’s male patrons and buyers, to the male gaze generally – is open to debate.

Certainly a room full of predatory, half-bestial men caught in the act of preying on exaggeratedly innocent, wide-eyed maidens left me feeling queasy and was maybe not the best final image to have of Rubens.

But this exhibition, exhaustive and exhausting, succeeds, and then some, in convincing you that Rubens was one of the most important and influential painters in western art.

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by Simon on January 27, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 27, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/rubens-and-his-legacy-the-royal-academy/