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A Bar at the Folies Bergère by Édouard Manet

Bar at the Folies Begere — A Bar at the Folies Bergère byÉdouard Manet

Yesterday I looked at a painting by the Belgian artist Antoine Wiertz and bemoaned the fact that although I could discover facts about the artist himself, I could find little information about the featured work of art. I have no such problem with today’s featured painting, A Bar of the Folies Bergère by Édouard Manet. Much has been written about this enigmatic painting. This will be the fourth occasion that I have featured one of Manet’s works and so I will not repeat his life story which you can find in my previous blogs (October 11^th and 12^th and November 9^th). Today in My Daily Art Display I want to simply concentrate on the painting itself.

As I have mentioned on a number of occasions previously, I believe that when you have a limited time in a town and you want to visit an art gallery it is sometimes better to go to a smaller one rather than rushing around a large establishment trying to see everything and failing miserably. Today’s painting hangs in the Courtauld Gallery in London which in comparison to the National Gallery or the Tate Galleries is somewhat smaller but what its collection lacks in quantity really comes into its own when it comes to quality. I first visited the Courtauld Gallery when I went to see Cezanne’s Card Players exhibition after which I decided to spend a few hours taking in the gallery’s permanent collection and it was then that I came across this fascinating and famous work by Manet.

The Folies Bergère, as most people know, is a famous Parisian night-club situated in the 9^th Arrondissement of Paris, not far from the heart of the post-Haussmann cultural centre of Paris, south of Montmartre, and a little east of the boulevard des Italiens (known simply as The Boulevard). The venue is located at 32 rue Richer, the same place that once housed a department store called ‘In the Pillars of Hercules’ . After almost four years, the departmental store went out of business and so in 1867 it was decided that the store should be replaced a public auditorium. The construction lasted for almost two years and it was the first music-hall to be opened in Paris. It was based upon an imitation of the Alhambra in London, a music hall known and much-loved for broad comedy, opera, ballet and circus. It opened in May 1869, a year before the start of the Franco-Prussian War, and is still in business today. It was originally called the Folies Trévise because it was on the corner of the rue Richer and the rue Trévise but the name was changed in September 1872 because the Duc de Trévise would not allow his name to be brought into such potential notoriety. As the rue Bergère, a road named after a master dyer, was just a couple of blocks away, the decision was made to rename the establishment as the Folies Bergère. A Folies-Bergère show typically included ballet, acrobatics, pantomime, operetta, animal acts, and many included spectacular special effects. However, the Folies-Bergère was perhaps more well-known for its sensual allures. It became chic to be seen at the Folies Bergere, so aristocrats and royal families alike came from all over the European continent to claim their coveted seats at the Folies. Manet’s picture features his friends, both artists and models and was the kind of trendy place in which he spent his evenings. The painting we see before us was the last great work of art painted by Édouard Manet and was completed in 1882. At the time Manet was suffering badly from a debilitating disease, brought on by untreated syphilis, which he was to die from the following year.

So what are we looking at? The woman in the painting is Suzon a waitress at the establishment, who posed for the picture in Manet’s studio. When I first glanced at the painting I thought I was simply looking at a woman standing behind a marble-topped bar and behind her were a large throng of people who were enjoying a meal whilst watching the entertainment but in fact what we are looking at is the woman standing between us and a large mirrored wall, the bottom of its gold frame can be seen running the full width of the painting, and it reflects what is actually going on behind us as we stand at the bar. The young woman, who rests her hands on the counter, wears a greyish blue skirt and a dark velvet jacket with a low-cut lacy collar and has a corsage of pink flowers at her breast. She has blonde hair which is tied back and wears two small drop-earrings and a gold bangle on the wrist of her right hand. The woman before us is not looked upon as a just a simple bar tender but more than likely falls into the category of a demimondaine. A demimondaine was a term used to describe a professional mistress who sold her company, affections and body in exchange for being maintained by a patron in a long term relationship. Later the word became a euphemism for a courtesan or prostitute. Some art historians have interpreted the main aspect of the painting, the woman, as not only the seller of the bottled products we see on the counter before her but possibly the seller of her own body.

Now cast your eyes to the right of the woman and we see the reflection of the woman, or do we?. Should we simply believe that we are looking at a mirrored reflection of her? If Manet has simply drawn her mirrored reflelection, how could it be, as if the mirror is parallel with the plane of the painting then the reflection of the woman should be directly behind her and thus out of our line of sight. In the painting the waitress stands before us, upright and is looking directly out at us and yet the reflection of her as depicted in the painting has her bent over slightly turned sideways as she talks to a gentleman with a moustache and wearing a top hat. Something is not right. Many believe that in actuality Manet had not meant it to be a true mirrored reflection of the back of the woman but the image of the woman at another time in her life. Maybe Manet wanted it to be a depiction of what she is thinking as she looks into our eyes. Maybe she is dreaming of meeting her gentleman lover or remembering the intimate time when they last met. In Jeffrey Meyers book Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt, he describes the intentional play on perspective and the apparent violation of the operations of mirrors:

“Behind her, and extending for the entire length of the four-and-a-quarter-foot painting, is the gold frame of an enormous mirror. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called a mirror ‘the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into spectacles, spectacles into things, me into others, and others into me.’ We, the viewers, stand opposite the barmaid on the other side of the counter and, looking at the reflection in the mirror, see exactly what she sees. Her own reflection, however, is not directly behind her, according to the strict rules of perspective, but at a right angle to where she’s standing. It seems to reveal her long hair, cheek, collar and back as she serves and chats to male customer. A critic has noted that Manet’s ‘preliminary study shows her placed off to the right, whereas in the finished canvas she is very much the centre of attention.’ Though Manet shifted her from the right to the center, he kept her reflection on the right. Seen in the mirror, she seems engaged with a customer; in full face, she’s self-protectively withdrawn and remote.”

In an early preparatory sketch for this painting Manet placed the woman to the right of the picture and then her reflection in the mirror seems more realistic.

The woman intrigues me. I look at her and try and interpret her expression and by doing so, I may be able to build up a picture of her existence. How would you describe her expression? Is it one of unhappiness, one of disappointment, maybe one of nervousness? Her mind seems somewhere other than with us. Her cheeks are flushed. Is it simply due to the heat of the theatre or maybe it is a sign of extreme weariness. In some ways she has a look of innocence but her reflected image talking to a customer or client belays that thought. So in a way, maybe we are being asked to decide who the real woman is; the one who innocently looks out at us or the one who could well be negotiating the sale of herself?

Look at the bar which separates us from the woman. On it we see a glass bowl containing oranges or mandarins, a small glass with two flowers in which we see a partial reflection of the woman’s corsage and an array of bottles of unopened champagne. Critics have also pointed out that the mirror does not correctly reflect the bottles on the counter in type or quantity. However more interestingly, note the bottles with the red triangle on the label.

This was not a French product but Bass, a well known brand of English beer which was established in Burton on Trent by William Bass in 1777 and still can be bought today. The inclusion of these bottles in the painting, which in present day terminology would be called product-placement, signifies the varied clientele. Members of the Jockey Club and English bookmakers used to congregate every evening at the Folie-Bergère bars and Bass beer was brought in especially for them. Another interesting detail about the bottles on the counter is that the artist himself has signed his name “Manet 1852”on the label of the bottle containing the red liquid, on the far left.

The reflected background shows the interior of the theatre with its gilded balcony front and its large chandeliers hanging down from the high ceiling. It is a glittering scene depicting a sensuous world of pleasure. Round electric lights can be seen on the pillars which must have been in themselves a novelty as this type of lighting had only just come into being. Look to the upper left corner of the painting and you can just make out a swing and a pair of small green-booted feet which belong to the trapeze artist who is poised aloft on a swing, performing for the theatregoers.

manet_mirror2_zm — The installation of the painting at the Getty Centre exhibition (2007)

When this painting was lent out to the Getty Center in 2007 a mirror was installed to help dramatize the questions of vision and reflection raised by Manet’s painting. The painting raises so many questions and as Manet is not with us to explain his work, one can only guess at the answers. So I will leave you to ponder these points:

How would you describe the barmaid’s vacant expression, one of remorse, one close to tears ?

What had Manet in mind when he painted the off-set reflection of Suzon and why did he position her at the centre of the painting whereas in an early preparatory sketch she is to the right of the painting and the mirrored reflection of her seems more real?

The reflection shows a man talking to Suzon but why is he not shown on the side of the bar where we are standing?

We are standing on a balcony walkway in front of the bar and yet it is not shown in the mirrored reflection, why?

The marble bar top on which Suzon rests her hands stretches the full width of the painting and yet the reflected image of the of the bar top does not, why?

This is a truly intriguing painting and the next time you are in London you should make time to visit the Courtauld Gallery and stand in front of Suzon and see what you make of the painting.

The Reader of Novels by Antoine Wiertz

In recent posts I have looked at the works of William Etty, which featured nudity and the controversy they caused. I have also recently looked at works by William Blake the subjects of which caused many to question his mental stability. Today I am going to look at a work by a Belgian Romantic artist and sculptor whose works also caused some controversy and whose mental state was also questioned. He was looked upon as one of the great eccentrics in the history of art. His name is Antoine Joseph Wiertz and I was requested to look at his very unusual painting entitled La Liseuse de Romans (The Reader of Novels) which he completed in 1853.

Wiertz was born in Dinant, Belgium in 1806. At the age of fourteen, having shown a modicum of artistic talent, he enrolled at the Antwerp Art Academy. Here he studied under Guillaume-Jacques Herreyns, the Flemish painter who was considered the last of the school of Rubens and Mathieu Ignace van Bree, the Belgian painter and sculptor. Having come from a relatively poor family environment Wiertz was fortunate to receive an annual stipend from King William I of Netherlands through the good auspices of Wiertz’s protector, the politician, Pierre-Joseph de Paul de Maibe.

In 1829, aged twenty-three Wiertz moved to Paris where he stayed for three years and spent a great deal of his time studying the old masters at the Louvre. It was whilst in the French capital that he also came into contact with the French Romantic painters, such as Théodore Géricault and it was through him that Wiertz began to appreciate and admire the works of the Flemish master, Pieter Paul Rubens. Wiertz idolised Rubens.

Having come second with his entry in the 1828 Grand Concours for the Belgian Prix de Rome, organised by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, he tried again in 1832. This time Wiertz’s efforts proved successful and he was awarded the cherished Prix de Rome prize which came with an annual bursary and the chance to stay at the Palazzo Mancini in Rome for three to five years and all the costs of this stay were paid for by Belgian State.

Wiertz travelled to Rome in 1834 and stayed for three years. Here he studied the works of Michelangelo and Raphael. It was also during that time that his artistic leaning changed. He virtually abandoned his landscape works and his paintings which depicted life in the Italian capital and focused on Roman and Greek mythological subjects. In 1836 he completed one of his major works entitled Les Grecs et les Troyens se disputant le corps de Patrocle (The Greeks and the Trojans Contesting the Body of Patroclus) in which he portrays a scene from Homer’s book, Iliad. The way he depicted the musculature of the men vying for the body of Patroculus won great favour with the art critics and this painting was to prove a turning point in Wiertz’s career. It was a somewhat violent scene and it was said that children on looking at the painting ran from it in horror.

Wiertz returned to Belgium in 1837 and set up home with his mother in Liège. Buoyed by the success of this painting when exhibited in Rome he sent it to Paris to be included in the 1838 Salon but it was received too late and was included in the following year’s exhibition. However, much to his annoyance the painting was not placed in a favourable position in the Salon and it went unnoticed by the public, worse still it did not receive the plaudits from the French art critics and was criticised in the French press. Wiertz was devastated by the treatment his painting received and never forgave the French for this snub.

Following on from this debacle, Wiertz’s artistic style changed and the subjects of his works became somewhat more excessive. Tragedy struck in 1844 when his mother died and Wiertz was badly affected by her death. He left Liège the following year and went to live in Brussels where he remained until his death. In 1850, just twenty years after the formation of Belgium, the new Belgian government was in search of national idols and so when Wiertz, who had become famous in the country for his massive works of art, offered them to the State in return for them building him a huge comfortable and well lit studio. His offer was accepted and the government agreed to display his works in the building during and after his lifetime. They also agreed that the works would never be moved, loaned or placed in storage, but should remain “invariably fixed” to the walls of the studio Belgium had built for him.

Wiertz died in his studio in 1865, aged fifty-nine. His remains were embalmed in accordance with Ancient Egyptian burial rites and buried in a vault in the municipal cemetery of Ixelles. Wiertz was an artist with an arrogance which bordered almost on madness and which convinced not only his contemporaries but also himself of his own genius.

The painting featured in today’s My Daily Art Display is entitled La Liseuse de Romans (The Reader of Novels) which he completed in 1853 and is housed in the Wiertz Museum in Brussels. When I was asked to feature this painting, I investigated the artist and the painting thinking there would have been a lot written about the elements of symbolism in the painting and that many art historians would have written their interpretation of what is before us. However I was wrong as despite hours of research I can find little written about this work of art. I was tempted to discard this blog entry because of the this lack of information but because the painting fascinates me I thought maybe if I published the blog somebody may come up with some background to it.

I suppose the first thing I should do to try and fathom out what is happening in the scene is to state what I see before me. We see before us a naked woman lying on her back with her thighs slightly parted holding a book above her head to allow her to read it. Next to her is a mirror which reflects her nudity. Besides her on the bed are more books and we can see someone or something in the act of either placing a book on the bed or about to remove one.

I get the impression that the woman is enjoying what she is reading. Dare I suggest that the book is in some way titillating her and maybe the contents of the book are of a sexual nature? Look closely at the figure, which is surreptitiously moving his hand towards the books on the bed. Am I imagining that he has “horn like” structures on his head? Am I to conclude that this is actually a satyr and that he is supplying the woman with books of a sexual nature which she is finding so arousing? Are we looking at a scene of temptation and corruption?

I do apologise for not having any firm answers as to what is going on in the painting but then again we must remember that they would only be opinions and interpretations by third parties and who is to say they are correct in their assumptions. So what is your opinion on what we are looking at in today’s featured painting?

Hogarth’s Studio in 1739 by Edward Matthew Ward

One of the unexpected pleasures I get when I visit an art gallery to see a specific exhibition is that having observed the exhibition I always like to walk around and see the paintings in the gallery’s permanent collection and it is then that you unearth some gems. When I visited the York Art Gallery to take in the William Etty exhibition I gave myself time to have a look at some of the gallery’s other paintings and it also gave me a reason to escape the clutches of the semi-naked live art performer (see My Daily Art Display of December 12th). It was during this perusal of the works that I came across a painting by Edward Matthew Ward and it is his painting entitled Hogarth’s Studio in 1739 that I am featuring in today’s edition of My Daily Art Display.

Edward Matthew Ward was born in Pimlico, London in 1816 and has been classified as an English narrative painter. Narrative paintings are an art form that tell a story. This is a long tradition in the world of art and probably dates back to the time of the ancient Egyptians. Popular trends in narrative painting have included history paintings which incorporates the likes of biblical, mythological, and historical themes and which were popular during the period of the Renaissance to the 18th century. We have already seen in earlier blogs of mine the moralizing story series of William Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode ; and then in the 19th-century the narrative art turned more towards anecdotal and sentimental narratives, usually depicting domestic scenes. In narrative paintings of the 19th century, the title became an important part of the artwork, often explaining the message.

Edward Ward’s parents encouraged his early interest in art and he was sent to a number of art schools, including that of John Cawse, the portraitist and history painter. Ward was a very talented artist even at an early age and even won an award from the Society of Arts at the age of 14. At the age of eighteen he exhibited his first work at the Royal Academy and the following year, 1835, he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools. At the age of twenty he set off from England and went to Rome where he remained for three years and it was whilst he was there that he achieved another artistic award. This time it was a silver medal presented to him by the Rome Academy of St Luke for his work entitled Cimbaue and Giotto, which he sent back to London and which was exhibited in the 1839 R.A. exhibition.

He returned to England in 1839 but on the way back Ward visited Munich to learn the technique of modern fresco painting. The reason behind that was that he wanted to take part in the competition to decorate the Palace of Westminster. In London, the old Houses of Parliament had been destroyed by fire in 1834 and the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster were built. Competitions were held for appropriate designs (‘cartoons’), with a number of leading artists commissioned to take part. To organise and oversee this project, a Royal Commission had been appointed in 1841, the President of which was Queen Victoria’s new consort Prince Albert. In all there were three annual competitions. The competition rules were that each artist would submit a full sized cartoon (preparatory drawing) with specimens of fresco or other techniques suitable for murals. The design of their submitted work had to be scenes from British History or Literature or personifications of abstract representations of Religion, Justice and the Spirit of Chivalry. Ward submitted his cartoon entitled Boadicea in the 1843 competition, but it was unsuccessful. However nine years later, in 1852, mainly because of his much admired historical works, he was commissioned to produce eight pictures for the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, on subjects drawn from the English Civil War. These were to depict parallel episodes on the two sides in the Civil War. Ward’s paintings depicted the opposed figures, as if confronting one another, across the corridor. By now Ward’s work was becoming very popular and he was never short of commissions.

In 1843, the twenty-seven year old Ward met Henrietta Ward the eleven year old daughter of George Raphael Ward, the artist and printmaker and Mary Webb Ward the miniaturist. Henrietta was besotted with Ward and despite the great age difference they eloped, with the help of Ward’s friend the author Wilkie Collins, and married in 1848 when she was just sixteen years of age. Henrietta’s parents were devastated and angered by this turn of events and her mother never forgave her and in fact, disinherited her. The couple went on to have eight children, one of whom, a son, Leslie, was later to become a portraitist and well-known caricaturist and cartoonist, who had many of his works printed in magazines, such as Vanity Fair. Henrietta although kept busy with her large brood of children was also a noted historical painter and her paintings of children, for which she used her own as models, were also very popular.

Edward Ward was very much influenced by the work of the English narrative artist William Hogarth and during the 1860’s he would mimic Hogarth’s style in his works which depicted incidents from British history. Ward’s life changed dramatically in the late 1870’s when he started to suffer from a painful and debilitating illness which caused him to have prolonged bouts of depression. In January 1879, aged 62, Edward Matthew Ward committed suicide.

The featured painting in My Daily Art Display today is entitled Hogarth’s Studio in 1739. Edward Ward completed this oil on canvas work in 1863. The setting for this painting, as the title implies, is the studio of the great English painter William Hogarth. Hogarth’s completed portrait of Captain Thomas Coram is seen on display. Coram was a philanthropic sea captain who had established the Foundling Hospital in London, in 1741. It was a children’s home established for the “education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children.” Although the word “hospital” is in the title of the painting, the establishment itself was not a medical facility. It simply indicated that it was a place of “hospitality” to those children who had fallen on hard times. The Foundling’s Hospital had a number of artistic connections. William Hogarth, who was childless, had a long association with the Hospital and was a founding Governor. It was he who designed the children’s uniforms and the establishment’s coat of arms and Hogarth and his wife Jane fostered foundling children. Hogarth also decided to set up a permanent art exhibition in the new buildings, and encouraged other artists to produce work for the hospital. Many of Hogarth’s contemporaries, such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Richard Wilson and Francis Hayman gave works to the establishment.

We see numerous children in the painting. All in their best clothes having come from the Foundling Hospital to Hogarth’s studio, to see the painting. To the left of the painting we see Hogarth’s wife, Jane standing at the table, slicing up the fruit cake. The little boy standing by Mrs. Hogarth has no time for the painting which is on display; all he is concerned about are the cakes! Hiding behind the painting we see the artist Hogarth and the subject of the work, Thomas Coram. Look at the little girl who stands in front of the portrait peering up hesitantly at it, as if it is the real Captain Coram. Another girl wearing a red-hooded cloak sits to the right of the painting. She, we must presume, is crippled and unable to stand for long periods of time as her crutches lie on the floor next to her. The girl to her right dressed in a sumptuous blue dress animatedly tells her all about the painting. Take time and look at the wonderful facial expressions of the children. I love how the artist has incorporated a multi-paneled window in the background and through it we catch a glimpse of a garden. On the floor we see a globe and a book which Hogarth has used in his painting of the seafarer presumably symbolizing Coram’s travels and knowledge.

It is a beautiful painting and but for my visit to the Etty exhibition in the York Art Gallery, I may never have set eyes on the work.

Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm by William Etty

In my last blog I told you about the William Etty art exhibition in York, entitled “William Etty: Art and Controversy and I ended his biography around 1807 at which time he had enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools where he studied under Henry Fuseli and received some private tuition from Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter who influenced Etty’s early works. So to continue with his life story…….

In 1816 he made his first trip abroad and visited both Paris and Florence. Here he studied the works of the Italian masters and soon he became a great follower and admirer of their art. The subjects of his paintings are mainly classical and mythological, commonly depicting female nudes.

Six years later he made a longer European journey and spent a lot of time in Venice where he studied the Venetian masters and it was during this time he began to master the use of colour which can be seen throughout his paintings. The sensual nature of his paintings scandalized the Victorian public of the day and Etty was often accused of being indecent. Nineteenth century art was expected to elevate the mind of the viewer by offering a pure untainted vision of female beauty. However Etty’s portrayal of flesh was seen as too life-like and sensuous. His Diploma Piece Sleeping Nymph and Satyrs which he submitted to the Royal Academy following his election to Royal Academician in 1828 was criticized by the then Professor of Painting who described it as:

“…Objectionable and offensive with just a veneer of respectability…”

Etty however, was not deterred by the criticism as on the death of his uncle and wealthy benefactor in 1809 he had suddenly become financially independent and was able to choose his own subjects for his paintings and not be worried about the tongue lashings he regularly received from the art critics of the day. He spent most of his later life living in London but would regularly escape the pressures of the city and go back to the tranquillity of his birthplace and the rural areas of Givendale and Pocklington where he was brought up. It was during these times that he was inspired to paint completely different subjects and although he will probably just be remembered for his grand classical and mythological canvasses, and particularly for his paintings of nudes, he painted many small works of the Yorkshire landscapes and portraits of his friends and relatives.

In 1848, when his health started to deteriorate, he left London and returned to York. His crowning glory came just before his death, when there was a major exhibition of his work at the Society of Arts in London, when 133 of his paintings were displayed. Etty died a year later, in 1849 aged 62. His remains are buried in the grounds of the nearby St. Olaves Church, York. Unlike many artists, Etty did not die in poverty and left a considerable fortune of £17,000.

My Daily Art Display feature painting today is entitled Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm, which he completed in 1832 and which, when not out on tour, is normally hung in the Tate Britain Gallery in London. The title of the painting comes from a line from the 1757 Pindaric Ode by Thomas Gray entitled The Bard.

Fair laughs the morn and soft the zephyr blows,

While proudly riding o’er the azure realm

In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes;

Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;

Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind’s sway,

That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey

This poem fascinated many Romantics of the time, like Etty, and he illustrates the line in the poem in this work of his. Paying no attention to the rocking of the golden-prowed boat caused by the Zephyr’s sweeping whirlwind, the almost naked women, in a pyramidic formation, clamber to reach upwards, snatching at the “bubbles of pleasure as they float away.

Etty himself described the subject of the work in a letter to the art dealer C.W.Wass:

“…The view I took of it as a general allegory of Human Life, its empty vain pleasures – if not founded on the laws of Him who is the Rock of Ages…”

Art historians tend to believe the painting which shows the young women playing at catching bubbles despite the onset of a storm is all about Youth in its careless pursuit of pleasure is heedless of impending doom.

According to Leonard Robinson in his book, William Etty, the life and art, the painting was bought by Robert Vernon in 1832. Later that year Vernon bought John Constable’s work, Valley Farm. To house this new acquisition Vernon decided to move Etty’s painting to another position and replace it with Constable’s work. Constable on hearing this wrote to his friend and fellow painter Charles Leslie:

“…My picture is to go into the place – where Etty’s bumboat is at present – his picture with its precious freight is to be brought down nearer to the nose…”

Vernon bequeathed the painting to the National gallery in 1847 and later in 1949 it was transferred to the Tate gallery in London.

As I walked around the main exhibition gallery the majority of the paintings by Etty all included nudes, mainly women but some men and I can see how nineteenth century people were shocked by the works. Of course, for us today who are used to seeing semi-clad or naked women in our daily newspapers and television we are not shocked by the works of Etty and look with some amusement on the puritanical values of the Victorians. Now we tend to concentrate on the beauty of his painted figures. So does nothing shock us these days? I would have said nothing shocks me any more with regards nudity and yet when I stepped from the exhibition gallery to the next door gallery there was a live art performance by an almost naked woman who cavorted and shouted at the few people who had been brave enough to sit on a chair at the edge of her “stage”. Did I take my seat? No, as there seemed to be an element of audience participation I just didn’t have the courage to place myself face to face with the naked female performer. So maybe I can understand how the Victorian people were shocked by what they saw and maybe in another hundred years people will marvel at why I didn’t have the courage to go face to face with my almost naked female live art performer!

Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, As She Goes to Bed by William Etty

Etty-Candaules_King_of_Lydia_Shews_his_Wife_to_Gyges — Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, As She Goes to Bed by William Etty.(1820)

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to York and visited the city’s art gallery which had a long-running exhibition of the works of William Etty. William Etty was born and died in the city and therefore he is the pride and joy of the city’s artistic community. However as we will see in this blog, Etty’s work was often very controversial.

William Etty’s father, Matthew, was a miller and his mother, Esther Calverley, was the sister of the Squire of Hayton, Matthew was aged 28 and Esther just 17 when they fell in love in Hayton and then quickly married at All Saints Church, Pocklington, in July 1771. But Esther’s brother was highly disapproving of his young sister’s marriage, and as lord of the manor, who owned both the mill and the milling rights in Hayton, he promptly ejected Matthew and his new wife from the mill, which was their home, and the newlyweds were ‘run out of town’.

They moved to Pocklington and set up a bakery business, but it did not take off, which may have been due to the wider influence in Pocklington of the squire. The young couple moved briefly to Easington, then made a final switch to York, where their bakery was more successful and Etty’s father again took up flour milling. Alhough they were never particularly well off they produced a large family of ten children, born between 1772 and 1793.

William Etty was born in York in 1787, and grew up in the family bakery. He spent some years at a Pocklington boarding school but in 1798, aged eleven, his father arranged a seven year apprenticeship as a printer at the works of the Hull Packet newspaper. Etty had shown an interest in art in his teenage years and fortunately, through the encouragement and financial support of his wealthy uncle, a successful London gold-lace merchant, he was later able to pursue a career as a painter. His uncle invited Etty to London in 1806 and the following year, aged twenty, he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools where he studied under Henry Fuseli and received some private tuition from Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter who influenced Etty’s early works. During this time he would visit the National Gallery in London and study the works of the old masters, especially the Italian masters of the Renaissance. During his time at the Royal Academy he would take part in the Life classes and continued with those studies well after he had became an Academician and well after he had completed all the courses. It was obvious that William Etty was fascinated by the male and female body and its portrayal. I will end Etty’s biography here and conclude it in my next blog.

My Daily Art Display today is entitled Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, As She Goes to Bed and was painted by Etty in 1820. The work is based on a story from The Histories of Herodotus, one of the most influential works of history in Western literature. The nine-volume work was written between 450BC to 420BC and records ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various cultures that were known around the Mediterranean and Western Asia at that time. In the first volume there is the story of King Candaules who according to the tale bragged of his wife’s incredible beauty to his favourite bodyguard Gyges. “It appears you don’t believe me when I tell you how lovely my wife is,” said Candaules. “A man always believes his eyes better than his ears; so do as I tell you – contrive to see her naked.”

Gyges refused; he did not want to dishonour the Queen by seeing her nude body. He also feared what the King might do to him if he did accept. However Candaules was insistent and Gyges had no choice but to obey. Candaules detailed a plan by which Gyges would hide behind a door in the royal bedroom to observe the Queen disrobing before bed. Gyges would then leave the room while the Queen’s back was turned. That night, the plan was executed. However, the Queen saw Gyges as he left the room, and recognized immediately that she had been betrayed and shamed by her own husband. She silently swore to have her revenge, and began to arrange her own plan. The next day, the Queen summoned Gyges to her chamber. Although he thought nothing of the routine request, she confronted him immediately with her knowledge of his misdeed and her husband’s. “One of you must die,” she declared. “Either my husband, the author of this wicked plot; or you, who have outraged propriety by seeing me naked.” Gyges pleaded with the Queen not to force him to make this choice. She was relentless, and eventually he chose to betray the King so that he should live.

The Queen prepared for Gyges to kill Candaules by the same manner in which she was shamed. Gyges hid behind the door of the bedroom chamber with a knife provided by the Queen, and killed him in his sleep. Gyges married the Queen and became King, and father to the Memnad Dynasty.

Before us we have a scene from the start of the tale in which we see Gyges creeping stealthily into the bedroom to catch a glimpse of the naked queen.

Looking through comments made by art critics of the day I came across one who described the subject of the painting as:

“ an undeniably disagreeable, not to say objectionable subject…”

Other reviewers called it

“…offensive, reprobate and a disgraceful story with debase sensuality…”

So what do you think? Beautiful or distasteful?

A Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig by David Teniers the Younger

A Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig by David Teniers II (c.1650)

I think there is an adage, or maybe it was just advice I was once given, that says you should be happy with what you have or maybe it was that you should just want what you have. There is certainly an element of truth in that as I can always remember a disastrous policy my former company brought out in making it known to all the employees what each person earned by publishing the grades of each employee and having a separate list of salary against each grade. Up to that point nobody knew what each other earned and most people had, until then, been reasonably happy with their remuneration but once they found out what their colleagues earned there were unmerciful screams around the building.

So what has all this got to do with art? The reason I bring this up is that as I told you the other day I went to see the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and a large number of them focused on winter in Canada. The winter scenes were well executed and very lifelike. However the problem came when I decided to have a look around the rest of the Gallery and its permanent collection and came across a winter landscape by David Teniers the Younger and really, in my mind, it was in a different class to those of the Canadian artists. I was completely amazed by the works of the Canadian artists until my eyes focused on Teniers’ work. Of course, by now you know I love Dutch and Flemish art and therefore I am slightly biased with my comparison but I thought I would let you compare the two styles and see what you think.

David Teniers the Younger was born in Antwerp in 1610. His father was David Teniers the Elder, also an artist, as were his son David Teniers III and grandson, David Teniers IV. His artistic connections don’t end there as his wife, Anna, was the daughter of Jan (Velvet) Brueghel the Elder and granddaughter of the Master himself, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His initial art training came from his father whose artistic talent would soon be eclipsed by his son, who would become the most famous, most revered and most prolific of the Teniers’ family of artists. Adriaen Brouwer, who at the time was well known and well loved for his everyday scenes, greatly influenced Teniers during his early career as did Rubens who was his wife-to-be’s guardian. At the age of twenty-two he was registered in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke and would later become deacon of that painter’s association.

In 1637 he married Anna Brueghel. The major part of Anna’s dowry was made up of pictures and drawings completed by her grandfather, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and her father, Jan Brueghel. Teniers spent much time studying these beautifully crafted works of art and they proved to be significant in the development of Teniers’s genre painting. In the year of his marriage to Anna Breughel, Teniers painted his first genre work entitled Peasant Wedding, which hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. It was the period between 1640 and 1650 that art historians believe Teniers produced his finest works. His expertise at depicting village scenes with large crowds of people, often in an open landscape was breathtaking. There was often an element of humour in his paintings and warmth in the way his characters were depicted on his canvases. In many of his works one could recognise the influence of the Bruegel family.

In 1651, David Teniers and his family moved to Brussels and besides carrying on his own art business he took up the post of court painter and the director of the art gallery of the Spanish governor-general, Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm. If you look back to My Daily Art Display of January 18^th you will see a painting Teniers completed entitled Archduke Leopold William in his Gallery at Brussels, which precisely documented some of the famous works from the Archduke’s collection. Whilst looking after this vast collection Teniers made many small-scale individual copies of paintings in the Duke’s collection by foreign artists, especially the paintings of the Italian Masters. Of these, two hundred and forty-four were engraved in 1660 under the title Theatrum Pictorium.

On the death of the Archduke Leopold-Wilhelm his successor, Don Jon of Austria continued to employ Teniers as court painter and in 1663 Teniers founded the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp which still exists and is one of the oldest of its kind in Europe. David Teniers the Younger was a highly productive artist and when he died in 1690, he left more than two thousand works. Most of the major galleries of the world exhibit a number of his works. He was an extremely good businessman and was highly liked by the aristocracy. Teniers knew the type of art the people liked and was very astute when it came to following the latest fashions and whims of his clients. His art work covered numerous subjects from portraits and religious scenes to genre pictures and still-life paintings. Teniers died at the age of seventy-nine in Brussels, five years after the death of his eldest son, David Teniers III.

The featured work for My Daily Art Display today is a painting David Teniers the Younger completed around 1650 and is entitled A Winter Scene with a Man Killing a Pig. The painting is amazing. It just glows in front of your eyes. An art historian and contemporary of Teniers summed up the beauty of this painting when he wrote:

“…For the richness of his golden and silvery light, for the delicacy of his vivid colours there is only one word, and that word is ‘magical…”

Before us we see a winter landscape and in some ways reminiscent of Teniers’ wife’s grandfather, Pieter Brueghel’s work, Hunters in the Snow another winter landscape painting completed almost a hundred years earlier. As well as being a landscape painting it is also a genre picture which does not offer us an idealized landscape, but instead provides us with a window for us to see real people getting on with their daily lives in a real setting. Snow lies deep on the ground and by the looks of the dark clouds there is more snow to come. Look how the artist depicts the rays of weak sunlight forcing their way through the clouds to light up the frosty winter scene.

Work on the farms almost came to a halt at wintertime giving time to the peasants to take the break from working the fields and well-earned time to sleigh and skate. To the left of the painting we see some houses. In front of the nearest house, a pig is about to be slaughtered. Although we may cringe at the depiction of the killing it should be remembered that in Teniers time this would be a common practice. It marked a time of celebration and we see emerging from the end house, a woman carrying a baby and an old man, dressed in black, leading out a young child so they could witness the scene. The butcher kneels on the animal while a woman holds out a pan to collect the blood. Every part of the carcass will be used. The children would be given the pig’s bladder so that they could blow it up and use it as a ball. The skin, once the hair had been singed off it, would be used as a kind of leather, maybe for shoes. The flesh from the large animal would provide meat for their meals all the way to Lent, at which time, the staple food would switch to fish until the end of the “fast” and the arrival of Easter.

So now you have seen an early twentieth century Canadian winter scene and a mid-seventeenth Dutch winter scene and I will let you choose which you prefer

Spring Ice by Tom Thomson

The exhibition I visited back in November at the Dulwich Picture Gallery was entitled The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson. The reason for the Group not including Thomson himself was, although he was closely connected to and had greatly influenced the seven members of the Group, he died before they had formed this artistic association in 1920.

Tom Thomson, who was born into a large western Ontario farm family in Claremont, Ontario, was the son of John and Margaret Thomson. It is interesting to note that unlike many early stories of artist’s lives, Thomson never showed an early interest in art. In his youth, he was far more interested in music and literature. At the age of twenty-two, he worked as an apprentice in an iron foundry owned by a friend of his father. It is possible that Thomson took advantage of his father’s connection with the owner and failed to fulfil his part of the apprenticeship as within a year he had been sacked because of his lack of time management. Thomson then decided that the excitement of military life was for him and applied to fight in the Second Boer war but was rejected on medical grounds. Later he would be turned down again by the Canadian military when he tried to enlist and fight in the First World War.

In 1901, aged twenty-four, he was admitted into a business college at Chatham but stayed there for less than a year, at which time he went to Seattle where his brother George had a business school. It was in this American city that he worked as a photoengraver and designed commercial brochures and spent a lot of his free time sketching and fishing.

Thomson returned to Canada in 1905 and two years later joined Grip Limited, a leading Toronto artistic design company. It was whilst working there that he met some of the future members of the Group of Seven. Apart from Lawren Harris, who came from a wealthy background and enjoyed an independent income, all the artists, who formed the Group of Seven, supported themselves at one time or another as commercial artists or graphic designers producing lettering and layout as well as illustrations for magazine and books. Thomson and his newly found friends, who all loved to sketch and paint, would often go off together at the weekends on sketching trips.

One of Thomson’s favourite destinations on his painting trips was Algonquin Park, a forestry reserve north of Toronto, which stretches between Georgina Bay on the west and the Ottawa River to the east. It is a vast stretch of pristine wilderness and an ideal location for landscape artists. Thompson first journeyed there on a sketching expedition in 1912 returning home clutching numerous sketches of the areas he visited. These sketching trips up north were a bit of a logistical nightmare as the artists had, as well as carrying food, shelter and cooking utensils, had also to carry their painting and sketching materials and this culminated in an almost impossible burden. The weather conditions for en plein air painting or sketching was not conducive for the artists due to the cold and wet and this necessitated them having to try and paint or sketch with speed in changing light.

My Daily Art Display featured painting today is one of Tom Thomson’s early works which he completed in 1916 and which is entitled Spring Ice. The 1915 study for this painting, in the form of a small oil on cardboard sketch, as well as the finished oil on canvas painting are normally housed at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. One should remember that many artists looked upon their preparatory sketches as works in their own right and not just as a preparation for the finished article. Thomson made some subtle changes to his finished painting in comparison to his contemporary sketch. Although the positioning of the land, trees and lake remain the same, the colours on the final canvas are noticeably different. In the finished work Thomson has used much brighter pastel colours and by doing so has cleverly brought to us a hint of spring. Also, whereas the sketch had a square shape, the oil on canvas work was wider and horizontal in shape. This added width allows us to get a better view of the blue waters of the lake. One can imagine the difficulty Thomson endured to capture the scene. Probably squatting down on the thawing earth, balancing his sketch box on his knee so as to obtain a low-level view of the lake. Can you imagine how cold it must have been and how cold his fingers must have been in the chilling air? It was those same frosty conditions which bit unmercifully at his limbs that prevented the ice flows from melting as they moved slowly in the water. We can see that there is a long time to go before the warmth of summer arrives to add warmth to the ground and tease the vegetation from the earth. We are still in spring and the trees have yet to open up their buds to the elements.

Artists like those of the Group of Seven had to endure great hardships in the cause of producing a realistic representation of nature. They had to paint quickly to capture the scene with its many moods as the light from the sun or moon changed. The mood for this painting is one of serenity and tranquillity and one can understand why artists like Thomson put up with the harsh conditions so as to record the beauty of nature.

Thomson’s life ended suddenly and in mysterious circumstances. It was the summer of 1917 and he had been out alone in a canoe on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park when he disappeared. His empty canoe was spotted later that day. Thomson was an expert fisherman, canoeist and hiker, and when his body was found eight days later in the lake it seemed incongruous that he could have died accidentally. To this day the circumstances of his death have remained shrouded in mystery. The official cause of death was given as “accidental drowning”. The investigation claimed there was a fishing line wrapped around his legs and he had suffered a blow to his head before he died. As with all deaths in unusual and suspicious circumstances, the conspiracy theorists have had a field day, putting forward numerous scenarios, which ultimately led to the artist’s death. Murdered by a neighbour, killed in a drunken brawl over money he owed his assailant, and killed by the father of a girl whom he had got pregnant were just a few of the many suggested circumstances that led to the artist’s demise. Maybe closer to the truth was the belief that it was a simple accident or that he had committed suicide during one of his many bouts of depression. We will probably never know the truth but the one thing we do know with great certainty is that on that lake in July 1917, Canada lost one its great artists, aged just forty.

The Corner Store by Lawren Harris

A few weeks ago I visited family in London and as usual I just had time to take in one art gallery as recompense for a crowded, although fast, rail journey. The problem I faced was which gallery to visit. I suppose logically I should go for the Leonardo exhibition on at the National Gallery which is receiving such rave reviews. However as I thought it would be too crowded I postponed that delight until next January. In the end I plumped for the Dulwich Gallery which lies south of the Thames and went to see a Canadian art exhibition entitled Painting Canada, Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Over the next few weeks I will give you a taste of some of the works by Thomson himself and some of the other artists who were part of The Group of Seven.

The Group of Seven, also sometimes known as the Alonquin School, were a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920-1933. The seven members of the group were Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, Alexander Young (A.Y.) Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, James Edward Hervey (J.E.H.) MacDonald and Frederick Varley. Tom Thomson who was part of the movement died in 1917 before the official formation and naming of the Group of Seven but has always been considered one of the group’s founders. This group of artists was to become noted for its works, which were inspired by the landscape of their country and in some ways are looked upon as being part of the first Canadian national art movement.

Many of the movement, namely Thomson, Varley, Lismer, MacDonald, Johnston and Carmichael had met when they all worked at Grip Limited, which was the name of the Toronto design firm and which was home to many of Canada’s foremost designers and painters during the first half of the 20th century. Later the final two members of the group, Jackson and Harris would join the firm. The Group was financially sound due, in the main, to the financial support from one of its members, Lawren Harris, whose parents owned the Massey Harris farm machinery company which would be later known as Massey Ferguson.

My choice for the first featured artist of the Group of Seven is Lawren Harris. Lawren was born in Brantford, Ontario in 1885. He was the first born of two sons. Lawren had a radically different background from that of the other artists of the Group of Seven. As I said earlier, Lawren came from a wealthy conservative family of industrialists as the Harris family was co-owners of the Massey-Harris agricultural equipment conglomerate. Harris had the luxury every aspiring artist could only dream of and he was able to pursue a career in the arts without ever having to worry about holding down a regular job.

He was privately educated and received his initial education at the Central Technical School and later the independent St Andrew’s College at Rosedale. At the age of nineteen he went to Berlin to study where he remained for three years. There he studied philosophy and became interested in theosophy, which in its modern presentation, is a spiritual philosophy which has developed since the late 19th century.

He returned to Canada in 1908 and once again settled in Toronto and became a founder member of the Arts and Letters Club, which was a club whose sole purpose was to be a rendezvous where people of diverse interests might meet for mutual fellowship and artistic creativity.

One may have thought that Harris, with his wealthy background, would concentrate on the wealthy aspects of life in Toronto for the subjects of his art but in fact his first subject after returning from Berlin was a series of six paintings of houses in what was known as the Ward, an area where much of the Toronto immigrants lived. My featured painting in My Daily Art Display today is one Harris completed in 1920, entitled The Corner Store and is housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario and is in complete contrast to his later paintings which I will feature in a forthcoming blog along with the rest of his life story. The painting is not of one of the beautiful mansions of his home area of Rosedale but of a simple building which housed the local grocery store. Lawren Harris appreciated the simplicity of its structure which contrasted with the complicated and erratic patterns of the shadows cast by the trees on the shop’s frontage. I love the way the bright winter sunlight illuminates the shop’s façade. I love the colours of the pale green wooden window shutters which contrast beautifully with the terracotta- red trim of the window surrounds. Look at the tranquil and cloudless blue sky above the building. This is a beautiful portrayal of a winter’s scene.

In a few months time a number of us will be overwhelmed by snow and curse winter so maybe snow is a beautiful thing if it is reserved for postcards, Christmas cards and paintings like this one.

Unemployed by Ben Shahn

My featured artist today was quite unknown to me. I came across him and his paintings when I was flicking through an art book looking for information regarding another painter. One painting stood out from the rest and I have made it My Daily Art Display featured painting of today. There was something very haunting about the picture with its great sense of realism and I had to find out more about the work and the artist, Ben Shahn.

Ben Shahn was at the forefront of the American Social Realist art movement of the 1930s, a grouping, which included the likes of artists of the Ashcan School, many of whom I have featured in earlier blogs. Social Realism is a term used to describe visual and other realistic art works which record the everyday conditions of the working classes and mainly feature the life of the poor and deprived and how they had to live. The works are a pictorial criticism of the social environment that brought about these conditions. Social Realism has its roots back in the mid-19th century and the Realist movement in French art. Twentieth century Social Realism refers back to the works of the French artist such as Courbet and his painting Burial at Ornans or Millet’s great work The Gleaners. Social Reailsm art became an important art movement in America during their Great Depression of the 1930’s.

The art of the Social Realist painters often depicted cityscapes homing in on the decaying state of mining villages or broken-down shacks alongside railroad tracks. Their art is about poverty and the hardships endured by the ordinary but poor people. Often the works would focus on the indignity suffered by the poor and how they would work hard for little recompense. The depiction of this inequality of course implied a criticism of the capitalist society and capitalism itself. The Social Realist painters of America did not want their works to focus on the beauty of their country as portrayed by the likes of the Hudson River School painters. For them, to get their message across to the public, their works needed to depict the industrial suburbs with its grime and unpleasantness or the run-down farming communities with their broken-down buildings. Occasionally these artists would depict the rich in their paintings but they were only included for satirical reasons.

Ben Shahn was born in Kovno, Lithuania in 1898 and was the eldest of five children of an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Joshua, was a woodcarver and cabinet maker. In 1902, probably because of his revolutionary activities, his father was exiled to Siberia. His mother, Gittel Lieberman, and her children moved to Vilkomir, which is now the Lithuanian town of Ukmerge. Four years later, in 1906, Shahn’s mother and three of her offsprings emigrated to America and settled in Brooklyn with Joshua who had already fled there from Siberia. Ben Shahn original artistic training was as a lithographer and then as a graphic artist.

At the age of twenty-one Shahn went to New York University and studied biology. Two years later he transferred to City College of New York to study art and then moved on to the New York National Academy of Design which is now known as The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts.

In 1924 Shahn married Tillie Goldstein and the two set off on a long journey of discovery taking in North Africa and the traditional artist pilgrimage of the capital cities of Europe taking in the works of the great European modern artists of the time such as Matisse, Picasso and Klee. He had not been won over by their art or the European Modernist art scene and soon felt less influenced by their work and preferred to follow the style of the Realists painters especially those who showed a concern for the plight of the downtrodden. Shahn was inspired by the likes of the photographer Walker Evans, the Mexican communist painter Diego Rivera and the French Realist painters. It was with Rivera that Shahn worked on the public mural at the Rockefeller Centre, which was to cause such controversy and had to be hidden from public view and eventually destroyed.

As a political activist Shahn became interested in newspaper photography. Photography was to act as his source material for some of his paintings and satires. During the 1930’s he was engaged in street photography himself, recording the lives of the working-class and immigrant populations and the hardship of the unemployed. Over the years Shahn, with his trusted 35mm Leica camera, built up a large collection of photographs which poignantly recorded the horror of unemployment and poverty during the Depression years.

My Daily Art Display featured painting is simply entitled Unemployment and was completed by Shahn in 1934. Shahn exhibited many paintings and photographs which highlighted the plight of the unemployed and homeless especially during the time of the Great Depression. Before us stand five men, all purported to be out of work. They look down on their luck. Their black eyes stare out at us. They stand upright trying to muster a certain amount of dignity despite the hopelessness of their situation. In some of their faces we see a look of desperation and fear of what their future may hold. The man in the right foreground has his arms folded across his chest. His look is more defiant almost questioning the viewer about what they intend to do about his plight. One man has a makeshift patch on his eye which makes him look even more vulnerable. I suppose Shahn and other Realist painters believed that through the moving nature of the subjects of their works it would help remind everybody of the horrors of life we could face and counsel us to avoid similar pitfalls in the future. Sadly, as in the case of war with its tragedies and horrors, we rarely learn by our mistakes and seem to always repeat our mistakes. There seems to be little we can do but shake our heads sympathetically as we view these Social Realist paintings and can only hope that we ourselves are never touched by similar tragedies.

Four Figures at a Table by le Nain Brothers

Le_Nain_brothers-Four_Figures_at_Table — Four Figures at a Table by the le Nain Brothers (c.1643)

If I was an artist, which sadly I am not, I would always be sure to sign my name somewhere on my canvas after I had completed the work. It would be a matter of pride. It would be a matter of recognition even if it had not been the greatest work I had ever painted. Today I am going to look at a painting which does not have an individual signature upon it. It is not that it hasn’t been signed. It is just that the signature is a kind of joint one, one signifying collaboration and it makes me wonder why that has been done. Is it that the painting is a collaboration of three artists who each painted part of the work? Was a decision made by the three painters that none of them should take more praise and recognition than the other two? It is very strange. My trio of painters are three brothers. They are the Le Nain brothers. Louis who was born in 1593, Antoine was born in 1599, although some art historians put his and Antoine’s birth date as “circa 1600”and the youngest, Mathieu, was born in 1607 and between them they created many amazing genre and religious scenes as well as portraits. Only 15 dated works survive, all executed between 1641 and 1648 and simply signed “Le Nain” but without a Christian name.

Their mother was Jeanne Prévost and their father was Isaac Le Nain who held the important position of Sergent Royal au Grenier à Sel in Laon. The family were moderately prosperous and around 1615 had purchased a farm and some vineyards. Historical records show that the le Nain brothers received their first artistic education from an “artiste étranger” which could mean that their tutor was from out of town or it could mean that he was a foreigner. Unfortunately any of their early work, which had been kept in Laon like the fate of a lot art, would have been destroyed in the lead up to and during the French Revolution.

Sometime around 1629 the le Nain brothers moved to Saint Germain-des-Prés, a suburb of Paris and set up a studio, which because of its location, was outside the control and regulations of the Paris Guild. Their business soon became very successful and they received many commissions, especially for their portraiture. Surviving records show that in 1629, Antoine was admitted as master in the Corporation of Painters in Saint Germain and there is mention of a large commission he received from the Bureau de la Ville de Paris. It is also recorded that Mathieu received many religious painting commissions and that in 1633, he was appointed painter to the city of Paris. However the records mention little about the third brother, Louis.

All three brothers attended the initial meeting of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture held in Paris on March 1^st 1648 and were admitted to the Society as founder members. Sadly, two months later, both Antoine and Louis were dead. They died within two days of each other in May 1648, probably of some highly contagious disease. They are buried at the Saint Sulpice church in Paris, recently made famous for the church at the centre of the Da Vinci Code film.

There is another unusual fact about the brothers, or to be more precise, the surviving brother Mathieu. Within ten years of the death of his two siblings, Mathieu’s financial situation had vastly improved and his social standing in the community had also risen. Mathieu’s social pretensions also increased and soon he was referring to himself as Lord of La Jumelle, which was the name of his parents’ small family farm back in Laon. More was to follow as four years later Louis XIV awarded him the collar of the Order of St Michel, a form of knighthood. This honour was only usually bestowed on those of noble birth and not an unprivileged painter like Mathieu le Nain. So why did the king bestow this award on him? There is no definite answer to this although he had spent a lot of time as a military engineer which may have contributed to his “award for services in the armies of the King”. However what is more strange is that a year later the king took back the award but Mathieu refused to stop wearing the regalia and in 1666 he was imprisoned for the offence of sporting the symbols of office when he wasn’t entitled to. Historians have put forward the view that Mathieu had friends in “high places” which resulted in his initial award but he also had an equal number of enemies in the same high places and they persuaded the king to strip Mathieu of his honour.

Mathieu le Nain died in 1667 and was laid to rest with his brothers at the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris.

It has been difficult, if not impossible, to attribute certain works of art to certain brothers and the closest they have come is the belief that the small paintings on copper had been done by Antoine and the larger more austere peasant scenes have been done by Louis. However it is agreed that this is not a foolproof method of deciding which brother did which painting. It is also strange to note that because Mathieu lived on almost thirty years after his siblings died in 1648, any paintings with the le Nain signature after that date, could be attributed to him. However there has never been a painting signed “le Nain” later than 1647.

My Daily Art Display featured painting today is entitled Four Figures at a Table and was completed around 1643. This small (44cms x 33cms) oil on canvas work is housed in the National Gallery in London. The strong light emanates from the left of the scene and draws our attention to the darkness of the background in contrast to the pure white of the cloth and the cap worn by the mother. There is a feeling of serenity and composure about the setting. There is a sombre dignity to this painting of a peasant family at the meal table. Their clothes are of brownish-grey shades, which is in stark contrast to the white of the tablecloth. I have featured many Dutch and Flemish paintings depicting peasants and in most cases there is a certain amount of squalor and drunken revelry associated with the scene. Here it is quite different. Here before us the le Nain brothers have given us a scene of tranquil dignity. There is no sign of mockery with regards the characters depicted and there is no moralising symbolism. This is simply a painting which exudes the quiet composure of the less well off. Some art historians would have us believe that this is a portrayal of the Three Ages. The old woman, hand on table, with her careworn face and look of resignation in contrast to the young woman, maybe her daughter, who is seated to the left, clay jug in hand, with her fresh-looking face looking out at us questioningly and in the background the tiny girl staring out at us with wide-eyed fervour.

Strangely, when this painting was subjected to X-radiography in 1978 it was discovered that there was a bust-length portrait of a bearded man in a ruff wearing clothes which date back to the 1620’s, painted underneath the current work. The X-radiograph exposed the man’s face and details of his costume with exceptional clearness. The underlying portrait, seen when the canvas was turned through 90 degrees, was thickly painted in colours containing a high proportion of lead white. This colouration of the under-painting, in contrast to that of the final painting with its relatively thinly painted in colours containing little or no lead white, meant that it showed up strongly in the X-radiograph. Why the original work was painted over by the brothers is not known and will never be known but where there once was a fashionable and wealthy citizen looking out at us, he has been replaced by four, less wealthy people sat at their meal table.

The subject of their painting, peasants, was an unusual subject for French painters at the time, most of whom were fixated with mythological allegories, and the “heroic deeds” of the king. The paintings of peasant life by the three brothers have a realism unique in 17th-century French art. However poverty and how to treat the poor was intensely debated especially by the Catholic movement in Paris. It was much later, during the years preceding the French Revolution, that paintings of simple country life became popular. So which of the le Nain brothers painted this work? Or is this painting yet another collaboration by the three brothers? We will probably never know the answer to that question but we do know that it was well received by the French Academy in 1648.