A Sketch in Separation Anxiety

As a follow up to our last blog entry – We’re ready for your close-up, Mr Forde – I wanted to take a closer look at one of the problems we recently encountered as part of the project.

It is important to note that the Crawford Art Gallery holds in its collection almost all known works by Samuel Forde and, as Shane has mentioned, we had the wonderful opportunity of viewing these on our recent visit there. Among these were, of course, his original sketches for Fall of the Rebel Angels (1828) which are beautifully executed on paper in pen and sepia ink. Leafing through them – with gloved hands! – we were struck by how these sketches not only shed light on how he prepared for his monumental canvas, but also on how Forde worked as an artist.

From what we can gather so far, Forde was a man of limited means and, throughout the last years of his short life, had to work as a drawing master by day to support himself as an artist. Viewing these sketches, however, really demonstrated to us just how economical Forde was (and had to be) with his materials. Looking at them, you can’t fail to notice there is little in the way of wasted space on any one page. Even in preparing the most ambitious work of his career (Fall), the artist elected to utilise his limited resources carefully. In fact, a number of these preparatory sketches accumulate and overlap not only across one side of a page but also on its reverse! While this in itself gave us a clear insight into both his method and means, we immediately saw that one group of such sketches presented us with a problem.

Our purpose in viewing these sketches was to select those which we felt most appropriate for any potential exhibition of Forde’s work in the future. Checking them off on our list as we moved from sketch to sketch we came upon two of the most arresting and important images. These depict the elaborately helmeted and crowned heads of what are in essence falling Angels, some of whom registering fear or distress in their expressions. The great humanity and pathos of these and the clear knowledge that they appear within the final Fall canvas (more on this to come!) made them certainties on our wish-list. The only problem was that they are sketched on the same piece of paper, back-to-back, three heads appearing on one side with another more complete figure on the reverse.

FordeSketch

Immediately, the anxiety of which side to choose hit us. If these were to be exhibited, how could we display both sketches at once? One solution – albeit off-the-cuff – which would involve cutting the paper and separating the sketches met with my most vehement disapproval and resistance!

You see, the paper on which these drawings are sketched must date to the time of Fall’s inception, and therefore must be 185 years old if they’re a day! These were also undoubtedly held by Forde and bore the weight and pressure of his hand – an exciting thought in its own right! This particular page, however, has a crease down its centre suggesting that it had for some time been folded in half. To my mind, and given that the fold separates the page evenly, the most obvious reason for such a crease is that it comes from a sketchbook, Forde’s sketchbook. The realisation of this was absolutely thrilling for us both! To think that not only were the sketches made by his hand, his talent and his intellect, but that these pages constituted what was left of Forde’s own sketchbook was both elating and deeply moving. For me this was akin to finding Forde’s diary and made my increasing connection to him palpable.

Of course, in light of this, there could and would be no suggestion of separating this page into two leaves – a fact later confirmed by one of the Gallery’s curators. Instead, it should either be displayed so that each side is visible on an alternating basis or in such a way as to make both sides visible at once. Nonetheless, while it is most likely an everyday problem for professional gallery staff, this raised provocative questions of art conservation and exhibition which had never occurred to me.

The integrity of Forde’s sketches as works of art in their own right, in addition to this particular piece being a fragment of a now lost, or rather splintered whole, is of considerable value in helping us understand and appreciate how he worked. So not only did our viewing of these sketches turn up evidence of the artist’s hand (sketched and printed) as Shane has already noted, but it has also given us a poignant insight into a living, breathing person of limited means who created and struggled with his creativity until his death.

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Read about our most recent Samuel Forde discovery.

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Learn more about how the Project began!

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Images © Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Photos: Dara McGrath.

We’re ready for your close-up, Mr Forde.

Recently, Mike and I got to view the Crawford Art Gallery’s Samuel Forde holdings up close and personal. These include some of his early-completed works, his self-portrait (naturally), and elements from what Mike deduces to be his sketchbook. Many of the latter relate to Forde’s ‘Fall of the Rebel Angels’, and we were especially excited to see the drawings for the original composition; what I can no longer help but refer to as ‘Fall 1.0’ (Much more on that to come in the future!).

Forde Sketches

There were, of course, very practical reasons for this visit; we needed to select pieces for the exhibition that is envisaged to accompany this project so they could be assessed for cleaning and restoration. As someone who (sporadically, now) draws and paints himself, having the opportunity to actually see another artist’s progress—the growth and development of a theme, the pinning down of ideas and forms that you yourself know can be so intangible and ephemeral, even the half-hearted dead ends—made the visit truly special. However, the day held an additional surprise that made it memorable.

One of the things we hope for on this project is to locate Samuel Forde’s diaries. Not only for what they can tell us about his process and intentions for ‘Fall’, but because as the chronicle of a young and talented artist facing death they could provide a deeply-human insight into the man himself. While their absence has left both of us feeling fidgety since the beginning, I in particular have bemoaned more than once the lack of any example of Forde’s writing—even his signature!

Perhaps my mini-fixation comes from my background in medieval history where engaging with the sources requires a forensic study of the written word. Sure, Forde’s diaries have been cited in various publications over the last 185 years, but that’s not enough for my inner historian. Without being able to ‘see’ Forde’s thoughts on paper, I’ve been worried I’ll never get a proper sense of the man, never really ‘know’ my subject as I feel I do (to some extent) with my seventh-century familiars. However, while our visit would give me my pound of flesh, I would be reminded that how we perceive expression is entirely subjective.

Looking back on it now, actually, I feel a bit churlish. As Elena, the collection registrar, talked us though each sketch and item, I found myself marveling at the achievement and talent I was seeing while still being at least half-concerned with finding some writing! We had started with Forde’s sketches, as we wanted to see how his intentions for ‘Fall’ had progressed over time, as well as seeing examples of his other work. Describing them is probably something Mike would be better at, but as you might be able to see from some of the pictures here, Forde’s style was simple and clean, and he seems to have had a way of accomplishing much using very few lines—the original Andrea del Sarto, perhaps (‘less is more’). His figures all seem to border on flowing into motion, and even as just an armchair artist I could picture them coming to life and finishing the action Forde caught on paper.

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As I said, this in itself was rewarding, but as we came to admire his portrait of ‘Poetry’ we suddenly saw it—Forde’s signature! Or rather the next best thing, an imprint of his name, ‘S. FORDE’, and the date, 1827, across the figure’s dress. Either way, there it was, Forde’s own hand at last.

FordeSignature

I’m not embarrassed to say I felt like we had discovered something great. It may have been small, it may have been short, but to me those letters were the conduit by which I suddenly felt a connection with Forde. I could even almost see him carefully crafting each letter; the way you’d proudly inscribe your name in semi-fancy script on the cover page of some new book, and thought ‘yes, this all happened, he was here’.

However, that warm, cosy feeling that only smugness can bring was short-lived. Even as I was still crowing about our ‘achievement’, Mike casually pointed out that we had been looking at Forde’s hand all along, from the very first day we stopped to contemplate ‘Fall’ to the sketches we literally held before us now. Of course! How could I have been so short-sighted? We didn’t need his writing to see his mind at work. Every line, shade, form, and expression in his art had flowed from the same hand that penned his diaries. In fact, when I thought of it, the former began to assume a greater importance, as with every picture he was literally fulfiling that old adage ‘a picture paints a thousand words’.

While this ‘revelation’ does not exactly shed light on Cork’s early visual-arts culture, I felt I should share the experience as for me it illustrates the various intersections, and perhaps tensions, between art and text that this project hopes to investigate. Like so many artists, Forde was inspired by what he read, and sought to bring words to life. His heroes and villains, his scenes and emotions, come from what he himself felt and saw through the product of someone else’s hand. The ease with which artists like him transpose text to canvas means we the viewers often need to learn new ways of reading the same thing. For me, this lesson is summed-up by a most telling thing: Forde chose not to write or sign his name as such – he drew it.

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Check out Samuel Forde’s sketches on the Crawford Art Gallery website.

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Learn how the Samuel Forde Project began.

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Images © Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Photo credits: Dara McGrath (1) and Shane Lordan (2, 3 and 4), with composite of images (1) by Michael Waldron.

A Chance Encounter… A Project is Born!

How do you miss a 12’ x 8’ painting?

That’s what we found ourselves asking one another when on a casual gallery visit last August. The painting in question is Samuel Forde’s Fall of the Rebel Angels – a nineteenth-century canvas of monumental proportions (both physical and artistic) – which hangs in the Sculpture Gallery on the ground floor of the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. An artwork of that scale should stick out like a sore thumb but, in our defence, it has to compete for the viewer’s attention with a hall full of Greco-Roman athletes.

Walking amongst these ancient nudes, we nonetheless became aware of the restless presence of Forde’s dark canvas, nestled beyond them in a corner under the high windows of the gallery. Apart from its size, however, why should this painting attract our attention?  Quite simply, it is remarkably unfinished. Worked up in umber, the bare edges of the canvas only suggested to us what the artist had been attempting before his tragic early death. So why concern ourselves with a work such as this? Looking closer we began to discern partially executed elements of the composition: a pair of seraphim guarding God’s heavenly throne, the anguish on the faces of the falling, and the huge scale of movement and energy. All of these elements are held together, in turn, by a dynamic central group of Lucifer and two companions. This, the most complete area of the canvas, anchors the viewer in an otherwise undefined and tumultuous vision of cataclysm, the cosmic scale of which is offset by the deeply human depiction of the Morning Star himself. This juxtaposition of light and dark, heaven and hell, the unknowable Divine and the recognizable profane, induced in us a jump of excitement – the kind you only feel when you ‘get’ something. It was in that moment that the complexity and ambition of Forde’s composition began to reveal itself to us and the idea for this project took root.

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The Samuel Forde Project

Borne out of our encounter with this painting, ‘The Samuel Forde Project’ seeks to explore the artistic and literary influences that shaped it – which may include, among others, John Milton, James Barry, Lord Byron and Thomas Moore – and to highlight their importance not only to Forde, but to the emergent visual arts culture of early nineteenth-century Cork. This was a largely mercantile city which, in 1818, saw the arrival of a collection of Greco-Roman casts, a gift from the Prince Regent (later King George IV). Today, the setting of Forde’s painting among these so-called ‘Canova Casts’ is entirely appropriate, as they informed aspects of its very composition. Samuel Forde (1805-28), it turns out, was one of the first students to study these at the newly founded Cork School of Art when it opened in 1819 and subsequently used their distinctive forms as exemplars for this, his masterpiece. So, rather than being an unremarkable curio tucked away in a corner, Forde’s Fall of the Rebel Angels (1828) is central to our project’s quest to understand Cork’s early visual arts culture and to situate this largely forgotten regional artist in context, in this the 185th anniversary year of both his painting and his untimely death.

While our research is still at the very early stages, we’d like to invite you to join us here as it develops over the coming months. Through our explorations of art and literature, history and anecdote, and various collections, archives and coffee shops, we hope to reveal the life and work of an artist in the context of his native city. The project will culminate in an exciting public event which we hope to announce soon, while there is also the tantalising prospect of our ultimate quest: to find the lost diaries of Samuel Forde.

Mike & Shane