by Simon Schama
If the Four Philosophers couldn’t make the journey from Florence to London, the irony is all the more acute because Rubens, as the exhibition makes clear, did a great deal of travelling before returning to fame and fortune in Antwerp in 1608. Hired by Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, to paint a gallery of ‘beautiful women’, he managed to get leave to go to Rome where he lived, eventually, with Philip in the northern artists’ neighbourhood near the Piazza del Popolo. Every so often he would report back to Mantua, sometimes travelling with the Duke to Genoa. There he painted stunning full-length portraits of Genoese aristocratic women, one of which shines in this exhibition: it is a piece of unapologetic costume glamour, the sumptuously loaded brush creamily caressing its subject. Rubens made studies of the Genoese palazzi and obviously loved the flash opulence of a banking republic in which brassy glitz was made elegant by the trappings of classical grandeur. It was like home, but with pomegranates and parrots rather than cheese and ale.
However, official travel brought trials that would test Rubens’s neo-stoical powers of resilience. Sent by the Duke of Mantua with a gift package for the King of Spain and his favourite, the Duke of Lerma (the usual thing – crystal vases full of rare perfume, horses so glossy and well bred they travelled inside their own carriages, original paintings and copies), Rubens endured the nightmare of unpacking the art to find it half-destroyed by damp. The Mantuan minister, who didn’t much care for this wet-behind-the-ears envoy displacing him, suggested that he rush off a landscape or two the way Flemings did. Instead Rubens painted the Heraclitus and Democritus included in this show, not just to display his philosophical credentials, but – since one scowls and the other laughs at the twists of fate and follies of men – perhaps also as a wry piece of autobiography. The artist who one day would enjoy his reputation as the prince of painters and the painter of princes already knew how to handle power.
None of this would matter were he not also on his way to becoming a great history painter, which is to say the artist of spellbinding altarpieces. Back in Rome, he was lucky with his timing. The Oratorian order was looking for someone to decorate their church. Annibale Carracci had given up painting, Caravaggio was on the run and Guido Reni was too untested. Rubens had his chance: he took several cracks at it and, when it failed because of the intense reflectiveness of the light, took out his neo-stoic manual of adaptability and did them something on slate instead.
Then he returned to Antwerp, breathing a little freer after the conclusion of a truce with the Dutch. In two years he knocked off two transcendent masterpieces – the Raising of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross – which, if all other Rubens paintings were to go up in flames, would still ensure his claim on the adulation of posterity. Of course, those altarpieces, which are triptychs in the old Flemish style, can’t travel. But the National Gallery exhibition provides a rich insight into the ways in which Rubens worked towards what became the grand spiritual machines of the big altarpieces, by means of preliminary studies, drawings, sketches and the ‘pocketbook’ in which he encyclopaedically gathered images, organised by subject.
What is so striking about those multiple try-outs is the way in which the improvisatory freedom – the rushing force of the pen and brush – manage to be translated so completely to the large-scale works. Rubens’s hand flies, but the works are in the best sense weighty, whether conveying the agonising upward heave of the cross – all sweat and raw sinew – or the burden of the crucified Christ dropping onto the blood-red caped figure of John the Evangelist.
The best passages are classicism fleshed out by naturalism: a barking hound, a winding cloth gripped in the teeth of someone at the head of the cross; brutality and pathos, momentum and stillness held in perfect equipoise. For these moments alone it’s worth trekking through the mediocre apprentice pieces, and hacking aside the underbrush of scholarly interventions, to get to those stupendous instants when, in front of his Massacre of the Innocents or The Death of Hippolytus, your eyes widen, your pulse races and you agree that the master has indeed been made.
Turner and the Drama of History
New Yorker, 24 September 2007
Poor old Turner: one minute the critics were singing his praises, the next they were berating him for being senile or infantile, or both. No great painter suffered as much from excesses of adulation and execration, sometimes for the same painting. Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On had, on its appearance at the Royal Academy, in 1840, been mocked by the reviewers as ‘the contents of a spittoon’, a ‘gross outrage to nature’, and so on. The critic of The Times thought the seven pictures – including Slavers – that Turner sent to the Royal Academy that year were such ‘detestable absurdities’ that ‘it is surprising the [selection] committee have suffered their walls to be disgraced with the dotage of his experiments’. John Ruskin, who had been given Slavers by his father and had appointed himself Turner’s paladin, not only went overboard in praise of his hero, but drowned in the ocean of his own hyperbole. In the first edition of Modern Painters (1843), Ruskin, then all of twenty-four, sternly informed the hacks that ‘their duty is not to pronounce opinions upon the work of a man who has walked with nature threescore years; but to impress upon the public the respect with which they [the works] are to be received’.
The reasons for both the sanctification and the denunciation were more or less the same: Turner’s preference for poetic atmospherics over narrative clarity, his infatuation with the operation of light rather than with the objects it illuminated. His love affair with gauzy obscurity, his resistance to customary definitions of contour and line, his shameless rejoicing in the mucky density of oils or in the wayward leaks and bleeds of watercolours – these were condemned as reprehensible self-indulgence. Sir George Beaumont, collector, patron and, as he supposed, arbiter of British taste, complained noisily of Turner’s ‘vicious practice’ and dismissed his handling of the paint surface as ‘comparatively, blots’. The caustic essayist William Hazlitt was especially troubled by Turner’s relish of visual ambiguity: the sharp line melting into the swimming ether. Contrary to Ruskin, Hazlitt thought it was unseemly for Turner to fancy himself playing God, reprising the primordial flux of Creation. Someone, Hazlitt commented, had said that his landscapes ‘were pictures of nothing and very like’.
But that is precisely what we do like, do we not? Turner’s art of conjuring something from nothing, and then (unlike God) having the temerity to deposit the working trace of that mysterious process on the canvas, has made him a paragon for modernists. He seems to have understood picturing as a collaborative process between the artist’s hand and the beholder’s eye, in which the former laid down suggestive elements and the imaginative observer assembled them in his mind to make a coherent subject. Sometimes he would help the process along, sometimes not. But he was much taken by the indeterminacy of the exercise, by forms that escaped resolution. The sobriety of the hard edge became, one has to think, a sign of conceptual banality, a weakness in the mind’s eye. For him the purest form, and one that he repeatedly returned to, was also the most naturally unstable: the rainbow.
Taken to task by an American buyer for the indistinctness of the very beautiful 1832 painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave – Hebridean cliffs veiled by streaming rain and sea spray – Turner, through an intermediary, begged the American’s pardon, for ‘indistinctness is my fault’. But, as that vice turned – for his modernist apostles – into a virtue, the script changed, and Turner was apocryphally made over into the defiant independent who had wanted the American to know that ‘indistinctness is my forte’.
It’s often said that Turner had only two true subjects: the anatomy of light and what Ruskin nicely called the ‘palpitating’ vitality of paint itself. His learned preoccupation with optics, the struggles to analyse and represent the diffusion of light, fathered a poetry of radiance, and grandfathers him into the ancestry of Impressionism; his emotively weighty manipulation of pigment did the same for Expressionism. S
o it is the Turners that most affronted the stuffy Victorians, mired as they were in anecdotal sentimentality and ponderous literalism, with which we most easily identify: pictures big with prophetic courage, the inkling of an alternative life for paint. With Turner, so this story goes, the story doesn’t matter; it’s the opera of the drenching colours, the unloosed play of the brush, the gouge of his untrimmed thumbnail scoring a groove through the sticky pigment – that’s his claim to immortality. Why should he give a fig about all those gods and heroes and Scriptures and battles?
Except that he did, obstinately and passionately, as the National Gallery’s show in Washington blazingly demonstrates. The procession of phenomenal narrative pictures that constitute its core makes it clear that we do Turner no favours by pinning the tinny little medal of First Modernist on him. Subject matter meant a great deal to him, and if claiming him for the poetry or the physics of light blinds us to the seriousness with which he yearned to be Britain’s first great history painter, he would not have thanked us. What, I believe, he wanted us to see was that, as far as the monumental oils were concerned, all his radical formal experimentation – the trowellings and the ‘mortary’ quality of the paint surface that his critics complained of, the scrapings and rubbings and stainings – was at the service of those grand narratives. It’s correct to think of light as his subject, but when he was most ambitious, light was a protagonist in an epic narrative of creation and destruction – an Anglo-Zoroastrian burn-out.
Regulus, for example, tells a gruesome tale probably drawn from Oliver Goldsmith’s Roman History, which Turner had in his library. The tragic hero Marcus Atilius Regulus was a Roman consul-general who, captured by the Carthaginians in the First Punic War, was released on parole and sent home to persuade his countrymen to sue for peace. Instead, Regulus urged the Senate to fight on, but, being an honourable gent, returned to Carthage to face the music. To punish him for violating their trust, his captors cut off his eyelids and stood him in the noon sun to go blind. Then they locked him in a barrel with the nails pointing inwards to finish the job.
Turner originally painted the picture in 1828 in Rome, where he took a lot of abuse for histories in which you couldn’t make head nor tail of the action. Stung by the criticism, Turner shelved the painting until, nine years later, he sent it to the winter show of the British Institution, in Pall Mall. There, according to contemporary witnesses, he confounded his peers by coating the picture with lumps of flake-white: ‘He had two or three biggish hog [bristle] tools to work with and with these he was driving the white into all the hollows, and every part of the surface. This was the only work he did, and it was the finishing stroke.’ At the end of the attack, the sun, a fellow Academician reported, was a protruding disc of pigment like a ‘boss on a shield’. Even though the white has yellowed somewhat, we can still see this intervention as an enactment of what happened to Regulus: the scalding of the retina, the light that switches off vision – white-out. Viewers complained that Regulus was nowhere to be found, but although there is a characteristically perverse miniature figure that might conceivably answer to the tragic hero, it’s more likely that Turner simply virtualised him into the murderous glare. That heavy-handed business with the white pigment wasn’t just a proto-Expressionist performance, but a calculated fit between manner and matter.
For Turner, light was not just the enabler of vision. Especially in his histories, he conceived of it as a dramatic actor: the vehicle of emotive as well as optical illumination; the agency of romantic disorientation or, in its absence, the demon of eclipse. And all these states of vision were personal and local, the spectacles of his own story. For Turner, the ultimate subject was always the history of Britain, and he felt that subject in his marrow. Yes, he travelled, relentlessly. Yes, there was Venice and Mount Cenis, and the Loire and the Alps, the Rhine and the Rhône and the Seine. But he always came home; at heart he was a self-conscious British patriot and, more than that, a Londoner, born and bred a five-minute walk from the Thames.
He was born on St George’s Day, 23 April, celebrated as the birthday of both Shakespeare and the Prince of Wales. It was the spring of 1775, the week of the ‘shot heard round the world’ at Lexington Green. So he came to maturity when Britain, shaken by the American debacle, turned to territorial memory for a romantically reinvented bond of nationhood. Geography was history and history was destiny. The young Turner, tramping the countryside in the 1790s, often sketched or painted in watercolours Gothic ruins or vaults where balladeers imagined ancient canticles being moaned in the moonbeams, mossy limestone crypts housing the sleep of ancestors: Ewenny Priory, Tintern Abbey, Stonehenge. The Napoleonic Wars triggered a burst of antiquarianism; greaves and helmets long rusted shut were extracted from dung-floored barns, given a lick of grease and polish, and reassembled to stand guard in the manorial hall.
Commercially astute, Turner knew that there was a ready market for this fabulous junk, but, in any case, he loved it himself. When, in 1802, it was time for a submission that would mark his acceptance as a full member of the Royal Academy, he offered a bardic romance: Dolbadern Castle, in Wales, the prison of the Welsh prince Owain ap Gruffydd, who had been locked up by his brother Llywelyn. The ruin was just a plain circular tower squatting on a modest hillock, but Turner gave it the full Romantic treatment, upping the altitude, lowering the point of view, backlighting the tower and setting it on a plinth of rock, crowned with scudding clouds. As in Regulus, the tragic hero of Dolbadern became virtualised, personified this time in craggy stone, not blinding light. Turner was interested not in the deeds of the heroes, but, rather, in the ways in which their memory might be visually transmitted to posterity. It was as though mere flesh and blood, however handsomely booted and spurred, weren’t quite sufficient, and neither was the art that purported to celebrate them – better to embody them in rocks and ruins.
His approach to war, too, was radically unheroic. The norm for battle pieces was to memorialise the genius of command and the gallantry of the ranks. Turner had tried this, in 1800, with an innocuous version of the battle of Seringapatam, in southern India, where serried lines of scarlet coats advance on the distant citadel of the Sultan of Mysore. But what he really liked, in common with much of the British public, was a good disaster. Around 1805, a series of calamities – the Plagues of Egypt, the destruction of Sodom, shipwrecks, the panic-stricken and the prostrate – begin to populate his large dark, thunderstruck canvases. In all these gloomy efforts, the human figures are limp, almost invertebrate, their faces summarised in a few caricatural strokes and their bodies weirdly attenuated, as if in a new Mannerism. Turner was not, as sometimes charged, an incompetent figure painter. He had spent years in academic drawing and in his early career had produced conventionally modelled studies. But when it came to the big oils he chose to stylise them, as if in self-conscious repudiation of the classical tradition. (And here it does seem legitimate to see that rejection inaugurating something that would end up with Matisse’s La Danse or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.) For Turner, the distortions were the agents of narrative: the representation of the figure as victim, the disarticulated plaything of history’s mischief.
In the case of the spectacular action painting The Battle of Trafalgar, Turner did his homework, going to Sheerness to see the hulk of Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, and carefully sketching its splintered beams. But he threw the research away to compose, in 1806, an astounding enactment of the chaos of war at sea, using a viewpoint high up in the mizzenmast shrouds, where, although ostensibly on the British man-of-war, the beholder can as easily imagine himself in the roost of the French sharpshooter who kills Nelson. The entanglement of the ships of the line, like so many lumbering dinosaurs locked in belligerent slaughter, is described through an inchoate massing of sails, each impossible to connect to any vessel in particular. It’s a maritime traffic jam, a smoke-choked pile-up with nowhere to go, no visible stretch of sea! And, in case people weren’t already confused, Turner made matters wors
e by collapsing two discrete consecutive episodes into one: the French surrender, indicated by the tricolour laid on the deck of Nelson’s flagship, and the canonical climax of Trafalgar, Nelson dying, stretched out amid the huddle of his grieving officers. Victory’s victory becomes pyrrhic, the tragedy embittering the triumph.
The Duke of Wellington fared no better than Nelson. In 1817, Turner, after visiting the site of the bloody victory over Napoleon, at Waterloo, chose instead to paint the harrowing aftermath: a nocturnal carpet of corpses lit by the sulphurous glare of a rocket, with grieving wives and sweethearts, some of them carrying infants, searching desperately through the human debris. It is a return to the distraught Niobes of the Greeks, the wailing woman as personification of calamity.
Tragic poundings – fires that cleansed, extinctions that were the prelude to rebirths – became the great theme of Turner’s mature epics. It was as though the life cycle of the man born on Shakespeare’s birthday were an emblem of England’s own fate: history written on the body. Turner was tormented by asthmatic wheezes and joint pains, for which he took the narcotic herb thorn apple (consumed daily through the goop that accumulated in the bowl of his pipe). As middle age advanced, he felt a steady drumbeat of decease, the winnowing of those closest to him. In 1825, his patron and first great collector, the Yorkshireman Walter Fawkes, radical in politics and hospitable in character, died in debt; then, in 1829, Old Dad, whom the son had shamelessly exploited as factotum and workhorse, but who had also been his bosom friend; then the heavily landed connoisseur and collector (of women as well as of pictures) George Wyndham, the Third Earl of Egremont, who, after Fawkes’s death, had made Turner his house artist, giving him lodging and studio space. In return, he painted, rather ambiguously, a series of glimmering rectangular views of house and park and some of the Earl’s business enterprises – such as the Chichester Canal and the Brighton Chain Pier – designed to be set in the panelled walls of the dining room. Two of those paintings Turner elongated, the fish-eye vision emptying the frame and lending the space a sombre fatefulness. The canal is aligned ninety degrees to the picture plane, and, on it, a little man hunched in a coat, a battered hat on his head, sits in a rowboat fishing – one of Turner’s favourite pursuits – as a black-sailed brig moves ominously towards us, an allegorical self-portrait smuggled into the commission. A note of elegy seems to hang over Turner’s work for Egremont. After going to the Earl’s funeral, in 1837, he painted one of the house’s great rooms in wild disarray, as if the aristocratic world that the Earl embodied had been attacked by an invasion of light.