Vincent Van Gogh injures himself, December 1888

On 24th December 1888 occurred one of history’s best-known acts of self-mutilation, namely the severing of part of his ear by the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh.

Van Gogh had settled in the town of Arles in southern France, where, in February of that year, he had hoped to start a community of like-minded artists. However, nobody else was willing to abandon Paris to join him and it was only when Vincent’s brother Theo offered to pay his train fare that one artist, Paul Gauguin, was persuaded to go south. Theo knew just how mentally unstable Vincent was, and he feared for the consequences if Vincent was left on his own.

To start with, the two artists struck up a relationship and they lived and painted together for two months. However, Gauguin then came to realise that the differences between them were greater than the similarities and he sought to bring the arrangement to an end.

Van Gogh was extremely distressed by this prospect and became violent towards Gauguin. Things came to a head on Christmas Eve when he attacked Gauguin with a razor, although he failed to wound him. It was after this that he shut himself away and used the razor to cut off part of his ear. It was apparently his intention to give it to his favourite prostitute as a somewhat bizarre Christmas present.

Paul Gauguin left the following day and the two artists never saw each other again. Gauguin settled in Brittany before going even further away – to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. Vincent Van Gogh did not stay in Arles for much longer before committing himself to a mental asylum and then returning to Paris, where he shot himself in July 1890. It was a sad end for a tormented genius.

© John Welford

Tintoretto, a great but crafty Venetian artist

The name “Tintoretto” was a nickname, meaning “the little dyer” or “the son of the dyer” which was given to Jacopo Robusti (c.1519-1594) because he was the eldest of the 21 children of a Venetian dyer of silk cloth.

His father took note of Jacopo’s talent for painting at an early age. The boy had a penchant for daubing pigments on the wall of his father’s workshop in ways that were more creative than the sort of behaviour that might normally lead to a clip round the ear in such circumstances, and so, when he was about 14, his father sent him to the artist Titian (then aged 56) to see if he could be trained to make the best use of his skills.

The story goes that Titian sent him home after only ten days in his studio, on the grounds that the work Tintoretto was producing was so much better than that of his master that Titian grew jealous and refused to have him around. This is unlikely to be the real explanation, and it is far more likely that Titian recognised that the young man’s independent style was such that he had little to teach him. Tintoretto was therefore largely self-taught.

Whether or not Tintoretto regarded his treatment by Titian as a rebuff, it is clear that the two men did not get on well. Artists of the day depended on winning commissions from wealthy patrons, and Titian was out to win as many high-paying commissions as he could get. Tintoretto realised that he could get work by offering to do it for less than Titian demanded. This was hardly likely to endear Tintoretto to the older artist, or indeed to other Venetian artists on whom he pulled the same trick.

Another reason for Tintoretto’s success as an artist is that he was extremely reluctant ever to leave the city of Venice, and he was therefore on the spot when commissions came up, whereas Titian travelled all over Europe to work for foreign monarchs, the Church, and other patrons.

Tintoretto was thus able to have a successful and lucrative career as a Venetian portrait painter. Venice was at the height of its commercial and political power during the 16th century and there were many noblemen and wealthy merchants who were anxious to be immortalized in oils.

In 1550 Tintoretto married the daughter of a Venetian nobleman. The couple were very close, even to the extent that Tintoretto hated to be parted from her for more than a day at a time. It is probably also true that she wanted to keep a close eye on him. On the only occasion when Tintoretto is known to have left Venice, at the age of 62, he insisted that his wife accompany him to visit the court of the Gonzaga family at Mantua.

Tintoretto was able to work extremely quickly when the occasion demanded and this ability, together with his quick wits and opportunistic nature, stood him in very good stead when a major commission was announced, in 1564, for the decoration of the interior of the Scuola (Brotherhood) di San Rocco, a building next door to the church of San Rocco in Venice.

Four painters, including Tintoretto, were invited to present designs for the central roundel of the ceiling, which would then be considered by the committee of the Brotherhood. While the other three painters went away to work on their designs, Tintoretto measured the space in question, painted a canvas in double-quick time, and stuck the result in place. When the committee (and the other artists) protested, Tintoretto offered to give the painting to the Brotherhood for no fee. As their policy was never to turn down a gift, they had no choice but to accept it and, having done so, felt honour bound to give Tintoretto the rest of the commission, which he continued to work on for the next 24 years, including major works in the church next door.

Tintoretto’s other major work was on the Doges’ Palace, which had suffered fires in 1574 and 1577 and which was therefore in need of re-decoration. Tintoretto worked alongside Paolo Veronese (who, as his nickname suggests, was an “import” from Verona). Veronese had worked in the palace in 1553 when he first arrived in Venice, and he did not always appreciate having to share the work (and the fees) with the troublesome Tintoretto, especially after he had been robbed of a commission when the latter had offered to paint a work in Veronese’s style, at a lower fee than Veronese would have charged.

Tintoretto’s greatest and final contribution to the palace restoration was a painting on canvas entitled “Paradise” (1592). It is widely believed to be the largest painting ever done on canvas, measuring 75 feet by 30 feet. It includes hundreds of figures, many of which were painted from life. Tintoretto worked on this with his son Domenico, who was nothing like as talented as his father, and the painting’s lack of Tintoretto’s typical skill in depicting light and space might be due to that fact.

Tintoretto’s style owed much to what is termed Mannerism, which contrasted with both High Renaissance style and Baroque. The term is often used derogatively, to indicate a falling off from the classical perfection of the Renaissance towards an emphasis on structure at the expense of naturalism. Thus limbs might be extended to unnatural lengths or figures placed in strange positions if that suited the artist’s conception of how the painting should be structured.

If Tintoretto’s works sometimes appear “stagey” there is a very good reason for that. He often designed a work by making model figures out of wax that could be twisted into the desired shapes and placed on a board, with flying figures suspended from wires. He would therefore produce something that looked like a stage set from a model theatre, complete with lighting effects, and he would then paint what he saw.

Tintoretto’s use of light had a lot to do with living in Venice. It was customary for heavy shutters to be used to shield inhabitants from the bright Italian sun, but the light that entered rooms would then be diffuse and often be bounced up from the water of Venice’s many canals. This meant that the colours that Tintoretto saw and reproduced would glow but be muted, such as dull gold, crimson, mulberry and sea green, and there would only rarely be a direct light source. The overall effect is fluid and dreamlike, but without the physical immediacy that one associates with Titian.

Tintoretto died on 31st May 1594. He was buried alongside his daughter Marietta who had inherited some of her father’s talent as an artist but had died in 1590 aged about 30. Tintoretto’s name lives on as that of one of the greats of Italian post-Renaissance art. 

© John Welford

Van Gogh's changing colours

Art historians are discovering that one consequence of Vincent Van Gogh’s poverty is that many of his paintings do not look today as they did when he first painted them. In particular, many of his areas of red are gradually turning white.

Wealthier contemporary artists were able to use high-quality pigments in their paint, but Van Gogh lived a hand-to-mouth existence for most of his life, depending largely on the generosity of friends to keep him alive. When the urge to paint seized him, he had to use the cheapest materials that he could find.

For his red colours he used red lead, which is a pigment that has been known since ancient times. Unfortunately, when exposed to light the compounds in red lead that give it its colour break down to a mineral that reacts with carbon dioxide to produce two white-coloured compounds.

The degradation can be seen in Van Gogh’s 1889 “Wheat Stack Under a Cloudy Sky” (see above) in which floating leaves have changed from red to white.

Another problem has been noted with the purple-grey colouring in his “Head of an Old Woman with a White Cap” (1885). Vogh Gogh used a pigment based on cochineal, but this has now weathered to a greenish tinge.

Of course, nothing can change the artistry of Van Gogh’s work, and his genius can never be dimmed by a mere change of colour, but it has to be recognised that what we see in the world’s art galleries now is not what the artist saw when he first stepped back from the finished works.

© John Welford

Frederick, Lord Leighton

Frederic Leighton was an artist who was immensely popular during his lifetime but who has fallen out of favour since his death. The modern viewer of his paintings and sculptures, which were mainly on subjects from Greek and Roman mythology, feels little sympathy for their stylised poses and waxen skin tones. However, to the Victorians, immersed as they were in the Classical revival that Leighton did much to create, they were all the rage.

Frederic Leighton was born in Scarborough on 3rd December 1830, the son of a physician, although he spent most of his early years abroad. When he was only ten years old he studied drawing in Rome and afterwards lived in Florence, where he was taught by several Italian artists. He later travelled to Brussels and Paris, where he continued his studies and copied pictures by Titian and Correggio in the Louvre, and in 1850 he moved to Germany and worked in Frankfurt for two years.

He then returned to Paris and set up a studio in the Rue Pigalle. It was from Paris that, in 1855, he sent a painting to the Royal Academy in London entitled “Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence”. The painting created a sensation in London and was bought by Queen Victoria. British viewers greatly admired its elaborate design, precise drawing and fresh colours.

Leighton did not return to Britain for another five years, but when he did he was immediately lionised and received all the commissions he could handle for paintings in the same style, taking much from the example of the Renaissance masters in their handling of Classical themes. His reception by London society was greatly helped by his courtly manners and the charm of his personality.

He associated for a time with some of the Pre-Raphaelites, but was always too much of an “Establishment” figure to have much in common with artists of the temperament of D G Rossetti, for example. In any case, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais had broken up by the time Leighton arrived back in England.

Among his most characteristic paintings were “The Daphnephoria” (now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), “The Return of Persephone” (Leeds Art Gallery) and “The Bath of Psyche” (Tate Britain, London). These all display close attention to detail and attempts to recapture classical perfection as closely as possible. He was regarded by his contemporaries as having succeeded in this aim better than anyone else since Raphael.

Leighton is regarded by some (e.g. Charles Johnson in “English Painting”, 1934) as having been a better artist as a sculptor than as a painter. Among his best known sculptures are “The Sluggard” and “An Athlete Wrestling with a Python”, which are both in Tate Britain. These portray male nudes as ideal physiques and possess a certain degree of artificiality in the way that the subjects’ musculature is depicted.

The problem with his paintings, to a modern eye, is that they look more like portrayals of statues than of real people. Perfection of form is put ahead of any emotional content. One possible exception to this judgment is the above-mentioned “The Return of Persephone” in which the abducted queen of the underworld is released by Hades to signal the beginning of Spring. In Leighton’s painting (dated 1891) she has her arms outstretched as does her mother Demeter shortly before they will clearly meet in a warm embrace.

Leighton’s popularity with the art world and the general public can be assessed from the honours that were heaped upon him. He became a full Royal Academician in 1868 and President of the RA in 1878, when he was also knighted. He became a baronet in 1886 and the first Baron Leighton of Stretton in January 1896. He was therefore the first British painter to be elevated to the peerage.

However, he also had a less welcome claim to fame in that he died on 25th January 1896, the day after the patent confirming the peerage was issued. As he was unmarried and had no heirs, the title lapsed on his death, making the single day of its existence the shortest ever recorded for a British peerage.

The wide popularity of Frederic Leighton’s works, and those of followers such as Sir Edward Poynter and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, can be attributed to the revival of interest in the classical world that began in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign. At a time when the minds of the public were aroused by newspaper reports of discoveries in Greece, Egypt and elsewhere, it is not surprising that visitors to the Academy should have taken a liking to pictures that sought to portray life in classical times.

Whether the art of Lord Leighton will ever excite such interest again is a moot point, given that the emphasis in his works on physical perfection at the expense of feeling and movement runs counter to modern taste. His works can be studied as an insight to the Victorian mind, but that is probably as far as most people today would be willing to go.

© John Welford

Can destroying a work of art be justified?

A work of art can offend for one reason or another, but is there ever a good reason for destroying one? The following example is a case in point.

Destroying works of art

There have been many cases down the centuries of works of art being deliberately destroyed for one reason or another. Sometimes it is for ideological reasons, such as when the Taliban in Afghanistan reduced the 6^th century Buddhas of Bamiyan to rubble in 2001; or it can be because someone simply abhors the work itself, an example being the burning of Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Sir Winston Churchill by Lady Churchill soon after its completion in 1954.

A more recent example of a desire to destroy a painting because of what it portrays, rather than its artistic merit, arose in Russia in 2013. Vasily Boiko-Veliky is a wealthy businessman who has the ear of senior members of the Russian Government. He is therefore the sort of man whose views tend to get taken seriously.

Ilya Repin’s portrayal of Ivan the Terrible

Vasily Boiko-Veliky has taken exception to a painting by Ilya Repin that dates from 1885. It depicts Tsar Ivan IV (“Ivan the Terrible”) in despair as he holds his dying son and heir, also called Ivan, after the older Ivan had attacked the younger in a rage and hit him on the head with a sceptre. The full title of the painting is: “Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on November 16, 1581”.

Boiko-Veliky’s objection to the painting was that it cast a negative light on one of Russia’s greatest historical figures. He is quoted as saying that the painting “offends the patriotic feelings of Russian people who love and value their ancestors”. He wanted the painting either to be destroyed or, at the very least, removed from public display in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery.

He claimed that the murder of one Ivan by the other is a myth that was invented by foreigners. However, the fact remains that Ivan Junior did pre-decease his father, which meant that the next tsar was Ivan the Terrible’s youngest son (the eldest had died in infancy), Fyodor, who was mentally unstable and unsuited to the role.

An interesting feature of attempts to deny that Ivan the Terrible killed his son is the fact that the event was apparently witnessed by Ivan’s chief minister Boris Godunov, who received blows from the sceptre when he tried to intervene. If the facts were incorrect, could it be that Godunov was part of a plot to hide the truth? Godunov acted as regent to Fyodor when he became tsar, and took the throne himself when Fyodor died in 1598.

Not the first time

Strange to tell, Vasily Boiko-Veliky is not the first person who has taken a profound dislike to the painting in question. The illustration here is of part of the painting after it was attacked by a vandal in 1913. A number of knife slashes were made and it took a great deal of careful work to restore the painting to its previous condition.

Surely there is no good reason to destroy the painting

The point at issue is surely not one of historical accuracy but the rightness or otherwise of censoring art because it does not convey the “correct” message. One can admire a work of art from many perspectives, even if one profoundly disagrees with what it “says”.

This principle applies to all the arts. For example, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is widely recognised as a classic 20^th century novel, despite the detestable nature of its theme. One can appreciate the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss even when one knows just what unpleasant people they were in terms of their anti-Semitism, which some people claim to have detected in their music.

When it comes to public art, such as paintings in a gallery, there is also the question of whether a powerful person has the right to censor what less powerful people can see. You may not like a painting, for whatever reason, but nothing can justify your seeking to prevent other people from making up their own minds.

In the case under discussion, the Russian Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky, responded by saying that the painting will stay on display, whatever Vasily Boiko-Veliky says about it. This is particularly interesting in that Mr Medinsky has actually written a book in which he casts doubt on the Ivan the Terrible murder story. The two men agree with each other on the history but take a very different view when it comes to how that history is presented to people today.

There is also the complication that Ilya Repin is widely admired in Russia, being held in as much esteem as an artist as Tsar Ivan IV is as an historical character.

© John Welford

Henri Rousseau

The artist Henri Rousseau was born on 21^st May 1844 in Laval, a town in the Loire Valley of north-western France. His working-class father, who is variously described as a tinsmith or a plumber, had problems making ends meet, and the family was often on the move when the rent could not be paid.

Henri was educated at the Lycee in Laval, where he was a passable, though not distinguished, student. On leaving school he was employed for a short time in the office of an attorney, but when some petty thefts came to light and the finger of blame was pointed in his direction, he decided that the safest place to be was in the Army, so he enlisted as a bandsman.

He spent four years in the Army, making little impression as a soldier, and there is no evidence that he ever served overseas or was engaged in any military action. It was later suggested that his paintings of jungle scenes resulted from his having travelled to exotic places during his four years’ service, but that would appear to be an invention.

In 1868 he left the army and took a job as a collector of tolls for the Paris Municipality. This was quite a menial role, and does not really justify the nickname of “Le Douanier” that he was later given, as this translates as “customs officer”, a much more prestigious job title. He stayed doing this job until 1893, when he felt secure enough to retire and devote himself entirely to art, although this did not look like a very sensible option at the time.

At the time that he left the army he married the 15-year-old daughter of a cabinet-maker, who was also his landlord. She was to bear him six children, although only one survived to adulthood. His wife died in 1888 and Rousseau only married again in 1898.

Henri Rousseau’s career as a painter began around 1877, which is when his earliest surviving paintings were dated. He is often credited as being a “naïve” or “primitive” artist, which implies that he had no formal training. It is true that he was largely self-taught, but he did admit to having had some coaching from two established artists, namely Félix Auguste Clément and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

In 1884 he was given a permit to copy paintings in the Louvre, and it was this experience that contributed most to his self-teaching. For his subject matter he used Paris street scenes and the animals and plants that he saw in the Botanical Gardens, plus a hefty dose of pure imagination. He also used images from popular books and journals as his inspiration.

Rousseau’s main showcase was the Salon des Indépendants, which had first been established in 1884 and to which Rousseau contributed in 1886 and annually thereafter. The great advantage of this Salon, for an unknown artist, was that there was no jury to vet the entries and the only condition for exhibiting a work was payment of a fee. Rousseau’s paintings were at first ridiculed, but gradually they became recognised as having merit and some influential artists began to make encouraging remarks about them.

However, it was only towards the end of his life that Henri Rousseau really became noticed as an artist in the same league as contemporaries in the avant-garde movement such as Braque and Picasso. The latter became an admirer of Rousseau’s work, and held a banquet in his honour in 1908.

Rousseau became an exhibitor at the Salon d’Automne from 1903, this being the leading showcase for post-Impressionists and “Fauvists” such as Matisse. It was in this environment, in which colour and shape meant more than realism and impression, that Rousseau found his true home.

His reputation, and sales of his paintings, were growing strongly when he died suddenly on 2^nd September 1910, aged 66, having contracted septicaemia from a cut on his leg. Despite the recognition he had acquired in his later years he was never a rich man and he had a pauper’s funeral. The artist Robert Delaunay, one of his greatest admirers, paid for his body to be reburied in a more respectable cemetery a year after his death.

Rousseau’s painting style was completely original and changed little during his lifetime. It was totally at odds with that of his Impressionist contemporaries, being based on well-defined shapes of objects such as people, animals and plants placed in imaginary environments. He painted many portraits, but these were far from realistic, with facial features often being crudely depicted and the images appearing flat and out of proportion.

Rousseau introduced what he called the “portrait landscape” in which a familiar scene was the framework for the portrait but with the latter being superimposed on the former. An example is his 1890 self-portrait in which he stands dressed all in black, holding a paintbrush and artist’s palette, on a road beside the Seine. A moored ship is festooned with flags which obscure the Eiffel Tower rising in the distance. Walking along the quayside, apparently not far from the artist, are two people; however, they are in proportion only to the ship and not to the main figure in the foreground, beside whom they are toy-like in size.

Rousseau is best known for his jungle scenes in which animals such as tigers appear surrounded by bizarre vegetation with huge leaves, strange fruits and imaginary flowers. Rousseau was not particularly interested in accuracy, in that he painted bananas growing downwards rather than upwards and animals in close proximity that could never meet in the wild.

He also, with a few notable exceptions (such as “Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)”), produced images that are strangely static. There is hardly any movement here, as though everything has become frozen in its place. People in a street scene do not walk but stand, animals stop and stare, and the trees are unmoved by any breeze.

It is hardly surprising that such paintings should have had a poor reception from their first viewers, given that they are, in many cases, faulty in one way or another. However, when viewed in a different context, namely that of the bringing together of abstract shapes and contrasting colours, there is clearly a different message coming from Rousseau’s work. The static, poorly depicted human figures look familiar to anyone who knows the work of L. S. Lowry, for example, and it is not a huge step from a painting such “The Dream” to the Surrealism of Dali and Magritte. Indeed, the trail from the Salon des Indépendants through Dadaism to Surrealism is an easy one to trace.

The work of Henri Rousseau is appealing to many people today because it is easy to “read” and his canvasses always have much in them to attract the viewer. They often appear childlike in their composition, and children enjoy looking at them because there is always something new and unexpected to find, such as a strange beast or bird that had not been noticed before. However, on another level there is also an erotic element in many of his canvasses, with defenceless women (often naked) being under threat from wild animals.

Rousseau’s paintings are now highly regarded and can be found in many of the world’s greatest galleries. It would surely have delighted the artist to know that some of his works now hang in the Louvre in Paris, where “”Le Douannier” taught himself to paint.

© John Welford