Untold Stories

by Alan Bennett

  Both groom and boy look quite stern and self-possessed, and though both are the owner’s servants they seem anything but servile, and are so indifferent to our regard as to appear almost arrogant. The reason may be that they have a skill that we do not share. They know about horses and this horse in particular, and they look down on us, who are watching them, because we don’t. Groundsmen and coaches have a similar attitude to spectators: they are professionals – we are just fans.

  I can’t decide whether Stubbs has made the boy’s right arm longer than it could possibly have been in order to have it reach over the horse’s neck. One would like to see a reverse angle on the scene in order to be sure. Mind you, I’m no authority. As a boy I was hopeless at drawing horses and thought there was something almost magical about other children who could. There were more horses about then, of course (though not like Hambletonian). Coal was delivered by horse and cart, as was milk, and when I was evacuated during the war – though I find this hard to believe now – I went to Ripon market by horse and cart. On the other hand, I have never been to a horse race.

  Stubbs was born and brought up in Liverpool, then moved to York, and then beyond York to an area even more remote than the one inhabited by his contemporary, the clergyman Sydney Smith, who complained that he was so remote from civilisation he was twenty miles from a lemon. An absence of lemons wouldn’t have bothered Stubbs, who shut himself up in a farmhouse at Hawkstow in north Lincolnshire, in what’s now Humberside, where he dissected and drew the corpses of horses, only abandoning the cadaver when it stank so much as to be intolerable.

  My third choice is Lorenzo and Isabella by Sir John Millais, painted in 1849 and now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Millais’s picture was inspired by Keats’s ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’, a story retold from Boccaccio. Lorenzo is in love with his master’s daughter, Isabella, and this arouses the resentment of her three brothers, who lure him into the forest and murder him, leaving Isabella to think that he has abandoned her. Lorenzo then appears to Isabella in a dream and reveals the whereabouts of his forest grave: she digs him up and brings home his head, which she keeps in a pot on her window sill in which she grows herbs.

  It’s a macabre tale which, in Millais’s painting, is just beginning, Lorenzo handing Isabella half an orange while the brothers look on. The most brutish brother teases his sister’s dog with his foot, while the eldest brother looks as if he is already making plans to do away with the upstart. On the window sill a pot of herbs hints at the story’s dreadful conclusion. Most of the people in the painting, even the unsympathetic brothers, are portraits of Millais’s friends and family; for instance, the old man delicately touching his napkin to his lips (in a gesture I had hitherto associated with northern ladies in teashops) is a portrait of Millais’ father.

  Many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, this one included, I find to some degree sinister or disturbing, peopled with characters who seem fearful or haunted, like the flower-seller in Ford Madox Brown’s Work or the potboy in the same picture, or the young John the Baptist in Millais’s Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop. They all look as if something dreadful is about to happen, which in Lorenzo’s case is no less than the truth.

  On one side of the table are the brothers, three in Boccaccio, two in Keats and it could be two or three in Millais – the young man at the rear looks less evil-minded than the other two. It’s a deliberate configuration and confrontation, but slightly awkward, as the rest of the party have to budge up on the other side of the table – though their sober dress suggests they are all inferior members of the household anyway and so not entitled to much comfort. The dogs, incidentally, don’t do at all well here, one getting teased by the probing foot, the other quite likely to have its paw or tail crushed when the awful brother puts his chair back.

  John Everett Millais, Lorenzo and Isabella

  I suppose the brothers would defend themselves by saying that they are concerned for their sister’s virtue but I don’t believe it, the young men’s obligation to keep their sister pure having more to do with their own frustrated desires than with any concern for morality. Besides, they don’t want her marrying Lorenzo because, however capable he might be, her destiny is to marry into the aristocracy, thus improving the family’s status. This element – and the mercantile activities of the family – is stressed by Keats, and Millais was very much aware of it.

  The painting had originated as one of a series of etchings planned by Millais and Holman Hunt in the first flush of Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm and there is a drawing by Holman Hunt, Lorenzo at Work Supervising the Brothers’ Warehouse, which strikes the same note. The initials of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, incidentally, are visible on Isabella’s stool. Millais was not yet twenty when he painted the picture and its technical accomplishment is astonishing, Ford Madox Brown saying that the modelling of the napkin carried by the servant was the painting’s supreme achievement.

  It was exhibited at the Academy in May 1849 and sold for £150 to three tailors in Bond Street who were making a start in picture-dealing. The tailors beat Millais down from his original price but threw in a suit of clothes as compensation. People disliked the painting so much, however, that they got rid of it for the £150 they had paid and lost the suit of clothes into the bargain. It passed through one or two pairs of hands before coming to the Walker Art Gallery as early as 1884.

  What always makes me remember the painting is the bully’s wonderful, terrible leg, arrogant, perfectly proportioned and up to no good. Here teasing the greyhound, today it might be flung loutishly across the aisle of a bus or shoved on a spare seat in the train, a hurdle one has to take (stepping over it or asking for it to be removed) if one is to retain one’s self-esteem.

  It’s the leg of a ballet dancer – Nureyev’s leg, if you like. I only saw Nureyev dance once, in Manon at Covent Garden. He was partnered by Anthony Dowell, who is much more delicately made. There was nothing delicate about Nureyev. He had legs, like the leg in the painting, that were not so much legs as hindquarters. Nureyev was often compared to Nijinsky and the comparison is apt. He was like Nijinsky, but it was Nijinsky the horse.

  The last of my four paintings comes from the art gallery at Aberdeen, which has a particularly good collection of modern British paintings, and from which I was hoping to choose Eric Ravilious’s Train Landscape. It’s a painting redolent of all the journeys by train that I remember, particularly in my teens and during my National Service, when it was still possible to explore the English countryside by rail, a period that the foolishness of Dr Beeching put an end to. I then found that I’d been forestalled and that this particular Ravilious had already figured in Sainsbury’s Pictures for Schools. Aberdeen has others, though, and appropriately, as so much of Ravilious’s work was done in the north of Scotland. He was a war artist and painted the convoys waiting in Scapa Flow to depart on the gruelling voyage to Murmansk. It was on one such trip that Ravilious himself died, killed off Iceland in 1942.

  Two other paintings of his that I like very much are Farmhouse Bedroom (1939), which is in the V&A, and one of England before the war called Tea at Furlongs. It’s seemingly a very peaceful scene but its emptiness is ominous and I think it could equally be called ‘Munich, 1938’. I might well have chosen it but it turns out to be in a private collection and so doesn’t qualify.

  Stanley Spencer, Southwold 1937

  I ended up plumping for another of Aberdeen’s pictures, a beach scene by Stanley Spencer, Southwold 1937. In my childhood, holidays at the seaside were often quite doleful affairs. It rained or was cold and if we weren’t cringing in the shelter of some breakwater, as they’re doing in the picture, we were probably trailing up and down the seafront until we were allowed to go back to the boarding house (which was strictly off-limits between meals). That was Morecambe or Cleveleys on the north-west coast, whereas this is Southwold in Suffolk, but the sea looks much the same. Stanley Spencer described it as ‘dirty washing water colour … splashed by homely auntie
s’ legs’ and the air of Southwold as ‘full of suburban seaside abandonment’. He’s right about the sea, though Southwold looks more sedate than he describes, no aunties paddling at the moment and scarcely a child that I can see. It’s certainly not Blackpool.

  Stanley Spencer painted this lovely, blustery picture ‘before the war’, as I tend to think of it, because within two years beaches like this would be cordoned off, the shore strewn with tank traps and the sea unreachable behind rolls of barbed wire. That was what the seaside was like when I first saw it, so this painting is for me a carefree vision of what holidays were like between the wars.

  In 1925 Spencer had married his wife Hilda in a village not far from Southwold, but in 1937 the marriage had broken up and Spencer came back to Southwold in great distress of mind. None of this sadness finds its way into the picture, painting as much an escape for the artist as the holiday is an escape for the people in the deck-chairs.

  Stanley Spencer didn’t quite play the artist in the manner, say, of Augustus John; but his odd personality has tended to get in the way of his professional reputation and has somewhat diminished it, much as Lowry’s did, both of them too easily caricatured as the artist as eccentric. It’s a way the newspapers have of making art palatable, of showing how unpretentious we English are, but it’s not much more useful or informative than a view of French art which has the painter wearing a smock and beret and living in a garret. There’s no doubt that Spencer was eccentric. His cousin said that he didn’t look fit to take a sheep down the street and he was a gift to magazines like Picture Post, one minute pottering round Cookham with his paints in a pram, the next doing his stint as a war artist in the Glasgow shipyards.

  One is so used to allegory in Spencer’s work that when it’s absent, as it is here, one feels a little uneasy, as if the painting is perhaps a detail from something much larger – ‘Christ and the Miraculous Draught of Fishes’, say, with the fishing boat just off the top of the canvas. Or perhaps it’s the ‘Calling of the Disciples’, Christ skirting the shoreline off to the right with some of these determined sunbathers blissfully unaware that they’re about to be enlisted among the Twelve. But Southwold is not Galilee, just a select, rather refined seaside place which retains much of its gentility today.

  The towels deserve a word. I know this kind of towel from childhood, thin, ribbed, the nap long since gone, and only just big enough to do the job. It’s the kind of towel, brisk, bracing and comfortless, that would have commended itself to Baden-Powell. Towels for me have always been strong indicators of class, the often smelly towel that hung behind the kitchen door when I was a child firmly putting us in our social place, a pile of thick fleecy towels in the airing cupboard signifying luxury and something that I’ve never quite attained. When I first went to America in 1962 the first present I sent home were some huge bath towels from Bloomingdale’s, the sort of towels I’d always hankered after. Typically, my parents never put them in the airing cupboard, but left them in their cellophane wrappers, feeling they were too good to use. The other thing to be said about towels – and these towels in particular – is that when one used to go swimming as a child to the beach or, more generally, to the municipal baths, one carried the towel under one’s arm in a kind of Swiss roll with one’s cossy in the centre. Children don’t do that now. Why? What happened and when?

  Looking at the four paintings I ended up choosing, I can see that three of them have to do with my own childhood, most obviously the Stanley Spencer with its echoes of pre-war summers I was too young to remember. Lorenzo and Isabella is also to do with school, where I was quite late growing up, and I was always very conscious of how big some of my schoolfellows were, making the young man with the perfect leg both a bully to be avoided and also someone whose physique I would have envied. Stubbs’s Hambletonian, Rubbing Down is childhood too, and the feeling I always had of being shut out of sports and the expertise that went with sports. Only The Adoration of the Kings is unconnected with anything I recognise or remember, though it’s also the most bewitching painting from a child’s point of view.

  This is not to say, though, that these are my ‘favourite’ paintings. I’d find it hard (and not very useful) to determine what my ‘favourite’ paintings were. Making lists of this kind – the Hundred Best Paintings, the Hundred Best Classics – is a silly game that newspapers and radio stations play. Of course, it’s easier to do with music, but I’m sure that if there was a way of putting paintings into some sort of league table, radio and television would not hesitate to do so. So just as one is supposed to wait with breathless excitement to find out whether ‘Vissi d’arte’ has dislodged Samuel Barber’s Adagio from its position at No. 18 in the Classic Countdown, no doubt with paintings we would be expected to catch our breath on hearing that Paris Bordone has made a surprise entry at No. 47.

  Who would have thought that one would one day groan at the name of Albinoni? God forbid that paintings should share such a jaded fate. Art is not a race. And there often is – and probably should be – something clandestine about it. When I was at school, art was a soft option for games and was in consequence looked down on. These days there’s nothing so respectable as art, which is fine, except that it makes art somehow official.

  All masterpieces are eloquent: not all of them are articulate. And of course it is, rightfully, one of the functions of art history to try and make a painting articulate: to demonstrate its virtues, inform you of its background and history and put it in its context. Some paintings have to be cajoled into speaking when they may have very little to say in words. There’s not a lot to be said about the self-portraits of Rembrandt, for instance. ‘I am’ is what they say. Or ‘Here I am again.’ In fact, there are two voices: Rembrandt saying ‘I am’ and the painting saying ‘I am.’ Of the paintings I have chosen, the most eloquent and the least articulate is Hambletonian, Rubbing Down. The National Gallery has recently acquired Stubbs’s Whistlejacket and that’s another wonderfully eloquent but wholly inarticulate picture. And though there’s lots to be said about both these paintings, what can be said about a work of art can never outsay what a work of art says about itself.

  Sometimes – and I don’t mean to disparage art history, which I’ve always found fascinating – it’s as if paintings were being doorstepped, art historians crowding in on them like reporters from the Mirror or the Mail, pestering some inarticulate unfortunate about ‘What they really feel’, teasing out an inappropriate and inadequate response when the person interviewed would sensibly prefer to say nothing at all. And maybe, hearing what is said about them, some paintings might shrug, saying: ‘Well, if you say so.’ The Mona Lisa’s smile is the smile of art.

  Portrait or Bust

  These notes arise out of a TV documentary, Portrait or Bust, which Jonathan Stedall and I made about Leeds City Art Gallery in December 1993 and which was first transmitted on BBC2 in April 1994.

  Other than ‘These are the paintings I like’ I’m not sure I’ve much else of consequence to say about the actual paintings. What I did in the programme was to advertise my own ignorance in the hope that it would encourage people with similar feelings of inadequacy where art is concerned to come into the Gallery nevertheless. Leeds after all is not an intimidating collection. To begin with it’s relatively small, you’re not outfaced by it and anyone with two hours to spare can see most of it. Watercolours apart, it’s weighted towards the twentieth century and has some of the best modern British paintings to be seen anywhere in the provinces.

  The Gallery is friendly too and (not the least of its virtues) has plenty of seats, often with quite odd or eccentric characters sitting in them. This is all to the good. It bears repeating that people come into an art gallery for all sorts of reasons; some, it’s true, because they like paintings, but with a lot of visitors, looking at the pictures is quite low on the list. They come in out of the rain, to keep warm maybe, or to take the weight off their feet; perhaps they’re early for a meeting or they’re on the look-out fo
r a meeting and have come in hoping to pick somebody up – all of which are perfectly proper and legitimate reasons for being here. An art gallery, after all, is not unlike a park. But the hope is – the faith is – that the art will rub off, be taken in out of the corner of the eye. Because the corner of the eye is a good short cut to the back of the mind.

  When I was a boy I used to do my homework in the Reference Library next door, and I’d come down to the Gallery not because I wanted to look at the pictures but because I wanted a break. I got to know the pictures by accident, by osmosis almost; I just absorbed them. And I can see that it’s from this experience that I derive my attitude to television, believing as I do that a lot of people switch on at random and with no definite idea of the programme they want to watch, just as they come in here at random and for a variety of reasons; but given good comedy, good drama, good documentaries, they can be diverted and elevated, just as they can be by good paintings.

  My appreciation of painting is quite shallow. I find it hard to divorce appreciation from possession, so I know I like a picture only when I’m tempted to walk out with it under my raincoat. However much I like a painting I seldom hang about in front of it, but go and get a postcard instead. Art is hard on the feet. I loathe standing, and get more speedily exhausted in a gallery than anywhere else, except perhaps a second-hand bookshop.

  My ideal gallery would be traversed by a narrow-gauge railway where one could be shunted into a siding in front of the pictures one likes. How Bernard Berenson could stand in front of a painting for hours at a stretch, just taking it in, beats me. Give me a postcard any day.

  The first visit I paid to the Art Gallery was early in the Second World War when I was aged eight. There was very little to see in the way of art as, in the expectation of air raids, most of the city’s pictures had been evacuated to a place of safety. Frantic operations of a similar kind went on all over the country in the early months of the war and famously in London, where the precious contents of the National Gallery were crated up and taken off, to end up eventually in a slate quarry in Wales, there to be hidden in caves.