Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Necessary to this merry-go-round is another misapprehension, namely that everything is quantifiable, that what visitors to the Gallery come away with can be assessed by means of questionnaires and so on. Well, maybe 20 per cent of it can, and maybe 20 per cent of all these efficiency-inducing exercises are worthwhile, or worth the hours and hours of time and form-filling they take up. And yes, one can gauge from a questionnaire how quick the service is in the café or how clean the lavatories are, but it cannot be said too often that the heart of what goes on here, the experience of someone in front of a painting, cannot be assessed and remains a mystery even, very often, to them.

  Another contributory misapprehension is that people always know what they want from the Gallery. It’s not condescending to say that they don’t. If most of the visitors here were single-minded and coming in just to look at the pictures the Gallery would be a much emptier place.

  The truth is people come in for all sorts of reasons, some of them just to take the weight off their feet or to get out of the rain, to look at the pictures perhaps, or to look at other people looking at the pictures. And the hope is, the faith is, that the paintings will somehow get to them and that they’ll take away something they weren’t expecting and couldn’t predict.

  So I’ll end with a tired shopper or someone coming home from work with half an hour to spare before catching the train at Charing Cross. Not really looking at anything in particular, and maybe not far from the entrance, they come across a picture of some towels drying on a balcony in Naples in 1782. It was painted by Thomas Jones and is scarcely a picture at all, more like a fragment of a building, the kind of thing you see out of the corner of the eye. And maybe that’s how the tired commuter sees it. But I’ve got great faith in the corner of the eye and with that remark of E. M. Forster that I quoted earlier: ‘Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.’

  * Though I think Emily Dickinson had the same thought.

  * See Seeing Stars, p. 157.

  Spoiled for Choice

  Four paintings for schools

  When I was at school in the late forties there were two sorts of paintings on the walls. Most classrooms hosted a couple of pictures scarcely above the Highland-cattle level that had been discarded by the City Art Gallery and palmed off on the Education Committee, which then sent them round to schools. These uninspired canvases didn’t so much encourage an appreciation of art as a proficiency at darts. However, there was another category of picture occasionally to be seen: reproductions on board of work by modern British painters – Ravilious, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Pasmore. These, I think, were put out by Shell and turn up occasionally nowadays at auction, though not quite at Sotheby’s. That I’ve always liked – and found no effort in liking – British paintings of the forties and fifties I partly put down to my early exposure to these well-chosen reproductions. So it was my own largely unwitting experience that made me welcome the Sainsbury scheme whereby every year four selected paintings are reproduced, framed and sent round with an information pack to schools local to Sainsbury’s stores.

  To be asked to choose four paintings from any of the galleries in the British Isles feels, I imagine, not unlike taking part in that dreadful TV game in which contestants are each given a trolley and the run of a supermarket and, dashing frantically between the cling peaches and the minced morsels, end up with far more Jeyes Fluid than any sane person could reasonably want. The supermarket, I hasten to add, not Sainsbury’s.

  As a Trustee I felt that one of my paintings should be from the National Gallery and I originally wanted The Good Samaritan by Bassano. It may seem, in view of its much more spectacular neighbours like Veronese’s The Family of Darius before Alexander or Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, to be a dull choice. Indeed this rather intimate picture is an exception for Bassano himself, who produced much more spectacular paintings, one of which, a tumultuous Nativity in the National Gallery of Scotland, at one point I had it in mind to choose.

  The Good Samaritan is quite low key, the Samaritan caught just as he’s trying to heave the injured man onto his horse; it’s an awkward movement because the man is either unconscious or unable to do much to help and the tension of the effort runs right across the picture. In the background the priest and the Levite, having chosen not to see the injured man, are making off. In the distance is the town where the Samaritan will pay for the man to be lodged until he recovers, the town thought to be a representation of the painter’s home, Bassano near Venice.

  So many paintings in galleries are populated by the beautiful and the perfectly proportioned that it’s a relief to find one of this date (mid-sixteenth century) where the characters are so downright ordinary. These are no gods, or athletes even: just one balding, middle-aged man helping another, their bodies worn and slack and past their best. That seemed to me to be something that a child could learn from – apart, of course, from the relevance of the parable itself, and particularly the fact that Samaritans were rather looked down on in their day, which points up the contrast between the priest and the Levite, who ought, if they were sincere in their beliefs, to have lent a hand, and the despised figure who actually did help. It’s as if you’ve broken down on the M6 and the only person who bothers to stop and help is a Hell’s Angel.

  Having decided this was one of the paintings I wanted, I was told that it wouldn’t reproduce well, so I had to look elsewhere.

  An obvious choice was the spectacular painting of St George and the Dragon by the Spanish painter Bermejo, which the National Gallery acquired a couple of years ago. Wherever you look in this painting there is something that delights: in particular, the vivacious and many-mouthed dragon – it even has mouths in its elbows. St George looks a little baby-faced but his armour makes up for it, particularly the reflections in his breastplate, which are said to represent the Heavenly City but look not unlike All Souls College, Oxford. Having chosen this painting, I was looking forward to the umpteen papier-mâché versions of the dragon – with or without egg boxes – that the children would inevitably construct. But again my choice was thwarted. The painting is long and thin and I was told it would be difficult to reproduce without a vast border of white – and since borders are something I hate I had to look elsewhere.

  Jan Gossaert, The Adoration of the Kings

  I finally chose The Adoration of the Kings by Gossaert, also called Mabuse, which hangs in Room 12 of the Gallery. There’s such a lot going on in it that it’s hard to take it all in: the Holy Family below, confronted by rich visitors and attendants plus a crowd of onlookers, the sky above buzzing with a flotilla of angels. The picture is painted in extraordinary detail, every bit of it in focus – which is partly why it seems so crowded and confusing. Caspar is offering the Christ child a gold chalice filled with coins, the lid of the chalice lying on the floor. Balthazar on the left is identified by an inscription on his crown, and Gossaert has painted his own name below it (and again on the neck ornament of Balthazar’s black servant). On the right, Melchior is waiting with his presentation rather precariously balanced in his limp hand. The detail is such that one can distinguish the hairs on the mole on Caspar’s cheek. Above the scene, and in another order of things, the angels crowd the sky, where the star that led the Wise Men to the manger is still shining. A dove representing the Holy Spirit descends from the star.

  Gossaert was an artist from near Antwerp, painting in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and this picture was done as an altarpiece for the Abbey of Grammont in Flanders around 1510. Somewhere on the painting the restorers at the National Gallery have found Gossaert’s own fingerprints. It’s a painting that cries out to be made into an Advent calendar, though there would be an insufficiency of windows to display all its wonderful detail. And yet I always feel that it’s with the Adoration of the Kings that the Christian story begins to go wrong; that the unlooked-for display of material wealth and the shower of gifts, for all their emblematic significance, are a foretaste of the wealth and worldliness that were to ensn
are the medieval Church; and while the Virgin, always the perfect hostess, takes it all in her stride, even in this painting, accepting the chalice of coins proffered by Caspar, it nevertheless bodes ill for the future.

  As is generally the case with the Adoration, it’s the animals who get it right, even though, as here, they scarcely figure, shouldered out of the way by the Kings and their arrogant followers, the young man on the left, for instance, the picture of boredom and superciliousness. In the Bassano Nativity the animals scarcely manage to get their noses in the painting at all. Here they do a bit better, as the ox keeps company with Gossaert himself, just peeping into his own painting, while the ass is at the back of the picture, where the sightseers are gazing over the ramshackle fence. The dogs, being dogs, get more of a look-in than the ox and the ass. They seem to be quite posh dogs and probably came with the Kings, both having distinguished pedigrees, the one on the left taken from Schongauer’s engraving of The Adoration of the Kings, the other from Dürer’s St Eustace.

  One way of looking at this extraordinary painting is as an advertisement for the Flanders Tourist Board, or as the equivalent of one of those airport bazaars where all the products of the locality are on sale. Embroidery, millinery, jewellery, leather, fancy goods – it’s all here. On this view, the Three Kings in their elaborate apparel could be seen as fugitives from the catwalk – and like anyone dressed at the very height of fashion, startling and not unridiculous.

  This way of looking at the painting isn’t entirely a joke, though, because if one wants a prime site from which to advertise, what better place than the altar?

  The character and situation of Joseph interest me partly because in most paintings of this period, and until the end of the sixteenth century, he has to take a back seat, particularly in paintings of the Adoration. He’s often so much in the background that one wonders if his role in the Holy Family, which is in any case ambiguous, isn’t made more so by his persistence in keeping out of the limelight. It must have been very puzzling. One can imagine a conversation between the Wise Men:

  ‘Who’s the guy with the grey hair?’

  ‘That’s the husband.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  And so it must often have been with Joseph, his situation not helped by his always being represented as getting on in years. This is possibly because he’s not mentioned in the New Testament after the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, Jesus then being twelve, and so is presumed to have died before Jesus’ ministry began.

  Even when Joseph is not depicted as old he is often made into such a pathetic and eccentric figure as almost to reflect discredit on the Virgin, who picked him out in the first place. But I suppose that to portray him as an old man or a bit of a fool bolsters the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. After all, there is a sense in which Joseph is cuckolded by the Holy Ghost, a notion which is easier to accept if he fulfils the familiar role of the elderly and foolish husband of a much younger wife. Indeed, in some mystery plays he was presented as a cuckold.

  It’s hardly fair and one feels that he’s rightly a saint, if only because, having to play second fiddle, he needs to be. It’s a situation one sometimes comes across in show business, the famous actress with the supportive spouse; and while Joseph hasn’t quite had to sacrifice carpentry to the demands of his wife’s career, he’s definitely No. 2 in this marriage, a male wife in fact.

  In Gossaert’s Adoration he shrinks into the background as usual, but it’s nice occasionally to find a painting in which he doesn’t and where the Wise Men pay him a proper degree of attention. There is, for instance, an Adoration by Giovanni di Paolo in the Linsky Collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, in which one of the Wise Men has his arm round Joseph’s shoulder and is also holding his hand, perhaps saying: ‘Well, I know what it’s like to be woken up in the middle of the night. I’ve got children of my own.’ Nice, too, when Joseph so seldom gets to hold the baby, to find him in a painting from the Paris Hours of René of Anjou, helping to bathe the baby and, in a fifteenth-century Book of Hours from Besançon, sitting by the fire, airing Jesus’ nappy.

  Looking at the extraordinary gifts brought by the Three Kings, a child might well wonder what happened to them while Jesus was growing up. The myrrh is traditionally said to have been used to anoint Christ’s body after the Crucifixion. But what of the cup? Did it foreshadow the cup from which he drank at the Last Supper? Did Mary and Joseph ever take it down from its shelf, unwrap the cloth in which it was kept and think back to that extraordinary time when kings and their retinues paid them court and pitched camp around their stable? Which, in Gossaert’s painting, isn’t a stable at all but a derelict palace, the run-down building a symbol of the teachings of the Old Testament, which Christ would now supersede and make new and so build his own temple.

  Painters of this period never get the baby right. He’s always far too big, as he is here, and frequently looks as if he knows exactly what’s going on, the problem for the painter being that, if he is the personification of God, he would know what was going on, and how do you represent that? But almost all of the babies depicted in paintings of the Nativity, sometimes spindly, sometimes gross, were they taken along to a baby clinic today would arouse concern. A paediatrician would have to ask Mary some very searching questions.

  The National Gallery is particularly rich in Gossaert’s work, not all of which I like, but none of his other paintings is as spectacular as the Adoration. One recent addition to the canon is a Virgin and Child, previously thought to be a seventeenth-century copy but which, when cleaned, was shown to be the genuine article. What to me is remarkable about this painting is that if you glance back at it from the door of Room 12 the illusion of it being three-dimensional is so strong that the Virgin looks as if she is a wax figure. It’s as startling an effect as the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors or the perspective tricks of the Hoogstraten Box. As a painting, though, I’m not particularly keen on it because the Virgin looks as if she is enthroned in a Victorian fireplace.

  Hanging next to Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings is Portrait of a Man aged 38 by Lucas van Leyden, painted around 1521. The age of the sitter is written on the scroll that he’s holding and, given his somewhat doleful countenance, if it said forty rather than thirty-eight it would be rather funny. I find it hard to say why I like the painting so much. It’s partly the austerity, which brings to mind some of Lucian Freud’s early portraits, while the sitter reminds me of Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal. When I go through Room 12 it’s the painting I always glance at as if it were a friend. I haven’t got anything more to say about it than that, though, and I couldn’t choose it as one of my four pictures because it, too, must seem rather dull. But I love it and I think it’s a reminder – and not one that all art historians would welcome – that about some paintings there isn’t all that much to be said.

  In much the same category as the Lucas van Leyden, a painting I find ravishing but can’t find much to say about is John Sell Cotman’s Greta Bridge, a watercolour in the British Museum. I was brought up on Cotman, in that they have a very good collection of his work in Leeds, most of it bequeathed by Sidney Kitson, who was so fond of the artist he was said to suffer from Cotmania. Understandably in my view, as I’ve yet to see a Cotman I didn’t like. But that just about says it all. It’s true one could find things to say about Greta Bridge itself, which has a dramatic history, and when I was a boy was the subject of a Children’s Hour serial. But nothing I could say would add much to the appeal of the painting, and if there is nothing to be said one should have the sense not to say it.

  My second choice, Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, by George Stubbs, was painted in 1800. It hangs at Mount Stewart, a National Trust property in Northern Ireland. Hambletonian was one of a string of racehorses belonging to Sir Henry Vane Tempest, a landowner from County Durham. Having already won some important races, the horse was matched at Newmarket in 1799 against a much-fancied rival, Diamond. The race was exceptionally dram
atic, both horses being cruelly whipped and goaded with the spur until, utterly exhausted, Hambletonian managed to pull ahead and win the race by half a neck. Though he went on to win other races, the horse never wholly recovered from his ordeal and was eventually retired to Wynyard Park in County Durham, where he is buried under a large oak tree.

  George Stubbs, Hambletonian, Rubbing Down

  Stubbs was an old man of seventy-five when he painted Hambletonian, one of his last pictures, but the drawings he made of the skeletons and muscles of horses years before show that he knew horses literally inside out. For a long time this didn’t help his reputation, as he was thought of as just an animal painter. It’s only in the last thirty years that he has come to be recognised as one of the greatest English painters, a landmark in this process the exhibition at the Tate in 1985, curated by Judy Egerton, from whose magnificent catalogue I’m cribbing most of what I am saying.

  The background of Stubbs’s painting hints at the scene of Hambletonian’s triumph, as we can see the pavilions and the winning post of the course over which his famous race was run. There’s no sign of the piteous state the horse must have been in at the conclusion of the race, no weals from the whip or blood from the spurs. Nor do the groom and boy who have charge of the horse show any emotions. It’s obviously not ‘The Triumph of Hambletonian’, which may well have been the kind of painting the owner wanted. Certainly Stubbs had a great deal of trouble getting paid for his commission.