Art, Colonialism and Change by Stephanie Williams

If you move fast, you can just catch the fabulous exhibition Entangled Pasts 1768-Now, Art, Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy in London which ends on 28 April.

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA used the banisters of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire for his magnificent piece, 'Woman Moving Up'.  Slowly, but steadily, her head a globe of the world, she heaves herself and a suitcase full of heavy baggage, up a splendid marbled staircase. Photo Stephanie Williams

Moving round this exceptional exhibition, I was struck by how much more powerfully a single work of art – rather than any number of words -- can express the pain and contradictions of history. Yet at the same time, offer a fresh perspective on the brutally contrasting and intimately entangled pasts of Africa, India, Britain and the Americas.

Of which we still know so little.

Bust of a Man by Francis Harwood, 1758,
John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

You enter the RA’s central rotunda to be greeted by a handful of fine portraits of Black men. Strong, handsome, elegant – among them works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, and John Singleton Copley. Each is accorded all the care and dignity, of any of their white sitters of their time. In the centre stands a black stone bust of a man from 1758 by Francis Harwood. Wonderfully lit, it is reflected up on a series of mirrors to alternate with busts of famous white men beneath the dome. The normal order of the white world has been subverted.

This is a show that makes its points with a light touch. Huw Locke’s Armada imagines the flotillas of craft engaged in the servicing of the plantation economy. At first these look magical. Mesmerising, tiny craft: fishing boats and lighters, miniature Spanish galleons. Look closer. High-rigged slaving ships, their sails, blackened and tattered, like the death ships they were. All are realised from abandoned lengths of string and cloth, plastic, wood and rubber and are suspended like flotsam and jetsam on uneven waves from the ceiling.

Hew Locke RA, Armada, 2017–19, Tate.
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. 

Benjamin West’s The Death of General James Wolfe – celebrated in my Canadian past as one of the nation’s great heroes – was painted twenty years after his death after defeating the French on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759. At his feet sits an idealised First Nation man. In fact he is a Delaware, rather than any of the native tribes to be found in the locale.

Benjamin West, The Death of General James Wolfe (1727-1759) 1779.
National Gallery of Canada

As edition after edition of prints and copies of this painting, conceived as record of a great patriotic victory, were reproduced and circulated around Britain and the world, this image laid the ground for the ideal of the ‘noble savage’ — the admiring onlooker, which recurred in similar works again and again. Here it is challenged by the work of Robert Houle, a Saulteaux Anishinaabe artist, whose Lost Tribes, 1990-1991 can be seen in the next room.

Similarly, Barbara Walker’s Vanishing Point series combines print-making and drawing to make the white figures who dominate well-known classical paintings, such as Titian, recede into the background, mere outlines impressed into paper, while traditionally marginalised Black figures rendered in graphite come vividly to life.

Each of these contemporary works force the viewer to assess well-known paintings from the white European canon afresh.

The Royal Academy itself comes under scrutiny for the works of art that were displayed at its Annual Exhibitions. And consider Johann Zoffany’s family portraits. A founder member of the Royal Academy, he had fallen out of favour with his royal patrons and sailed for India in 1783. Colonel Blair and His Family and an Indian Ayah shows an officer of the East India Company listening to his daughter Jane play the piano, fondly holding hands with his wife. To the right of the picture, his younger daughter, Maria, plays with a cat held by an Indian girl of about the same age. She is too young, surely, to be an ayah, the child’s nurse? Much more likely, she is the offspring of Blair’s Indian mistress.

Johann Zoffany, Colonel Blair and His Family and an Indian Ayah, 1786. Tate 

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) Poems on Various Subjects,
 religious and Moral, 1773.  The British Library

I make many new discoveries.

I had never heard of Phillis Wheatley, kidnapped from the Senegambia region of West Africa and enslaved by a family in Boston, who became a poet. Writing as confidently as any white male of the time, she bitterly protested the painting made by Richard Wilson of Niobe, — in Greek mythology the archetypal bereaved mother, who weeps throughout eternity for the loss of her 12 children, murdered by the gods. Niobe was made in 1761, the same year in which Wheatley was captured.

Nor did I know Shahzia Sikander, whose Promiscuous Intimacies 2020, knits together the Mannerist tradition of the west with classical Indian art to highlight the contradictions of a one-sided history.

 

Shahzia Sikander Promiscuous Intimacies  
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry

And have fun unpicking the rich symbolism of the Singh Twins in Indiennes: The Extended Triangle from the ‘Slaves of Fashion Series, 2018. 

 

The Singh Twins, Indiennes: The Extended Triangle 
from the 'Slaves of Fashion series, 2018, © The Singh Twins 

I have always been struck by the bombastic power – and incongruity -- of British architecture set down, often by Royal Engineers according to pattern books, in every former colony from Jamaica to Hong Kong. In Primitive Matters: Huts Karen McLean projects a series of large European style homes once owned by wealthy merchants and plantation owners in Port of Spain in Trinidad onto seven huts replicating the local vernacular.

Karen McLean, Primitive Matters, Huts 2010

There is much, more more to see.  Sit for a moment in front of Isaac Julien's film, Lessons of the Hour, about the abolitionist Frederick Douglas, who questioned, What to the Slave is the 4th of July?'  Consider Edwin Long's The Babylonian Marriage Market of 1875 shown not far from El Antsui's poignant Akua's Surviving Children 1996.    University of London, Egham. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry

The counterpoint between past and present is a potent device indeed.  What a waste it is this show is not on for longer.

 

Entangled Pasts, 1768 - NOW 

Art, Colonialism and Change is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, London W1 

until 28 April 2024

Photo Bill Knight

Stephanie Williams is a Canadian writer based in London and delighted to be writing for the History Girls, a blog she has often investigated when doing historical research.  Author of BBC Book of the Week, Olga's Story, the life of her Russian Grandmother, her most recent book, Running the Show, was based on an 1879 questionnaire which revealed the extraordinary characters who were Queen Victoria’s colonial governors. She is now at work looking into the back-offices of the East India Company in London to find out  exactly what went on there. See more at www.stephanie-williams.com

A Painting for the Cabinet of Curiosities by Imogen Robertson

I have been broke, very broke or oh-my-god-they-are-coming-for-the-telly broke at various times in my life, and at those moments it’s tempting to look at your past spending and wonder what in hell you were thinking. That thought goes through my mind every time I open my wardrobe door; but no matter what my financial state, the indulgent purchases I have never regretted are my paintings. Some I bought from shows, some from antiques warehouses, and some from the internet. It’s one that came from the latter category I want to talk about today and here it is:

I bought it as an unstretched and unframed canvas on ebay from a man in Glasgow. I think it was some time in 2001. He said he had picked it up at a market and had no idea where it came from. I got it mounted and framed, and hung it on my wall. Now, as you guys are a particularly savvy bunch, you have probably already recognised it as a copy of this painting - Room in New York by Edward Hopper from 1932. 

Room in New York - Edward Hopper 1932

I’m afraid I didn’t realise the connection until 2004 when I went to Hopper’s retrospective at the Tate. As I walked through the galleries, I thought, 'God these remind me of that painting at home'. The original wasn’t on display but I flicked through the Taschen book in the giftshop, and there it was.

I can only assume that my version was painted by an artist who was studying Hopper, and so he copied the picture to understand better the techniques involved. It reminds me of those artists one sees in all the major galleries making copies of the images on display. It makes me think about artists of all sorts learning their craft through exercises in imitation. The characters in Paris Winter spent much of their early years of study copying other artworks, and I know when I read things I love, trying to imitate the cadence of that writing in my own mind is part of my learning process. 

Room in New York - Hopper (detail)

Anonymous copy (detail)

But it's not a direct copy. The faces in my version are more stylised, the paint is not applied with Hopper's smoothness - in mine the darkness behind is breaking through. Though the colours are close, they are different - warmer in Hopper's original. My artist has followed those three patches of vivd red, but they have completely changed the colours in the picture hanging on the wall above the man's head.

Room in New York - Hopper (detail)

Anonymous copy (detail)

Why did the artist decide to change that, of all things? I wish I knew who he or she was and could ask. Perhaps they just did the picture for fun, or as a gift for a friend who really liked Hopper. Perhaps the feeling of isolation and voyeurism in the original attracted them, though the style of painting did not. I can’t say. My version has no signature or other identifying mark I can find. 

So it remains a curiosity, an item that provokes questions rather than provides answers, so I offer it for inclusion in our online cabinet. If anyone has any further thoughts or insights, I’d be really pleased to hear them.

Theft of Life is out now

Paris Winter is available in paperback

https://twitter.com/RobertsonImogen

One at a time, please – Michelle Lovric

Can you imagine getting so close to one of your favourite paintings that your eyelashes almost graze the canvas? Can you imagine sharing the painting only with a couple of dear friends and a security guard whose love for the work makes you forget the pistol in his pocket? Can you imagine the said guard pointing out the tiny but perfect white cat in the centre of the scene, a cat that is no more than an energetic swirl of an inexpressibly expert paintbrush? And can you imagine doing all of this in a candle-lit abbazia in the middle of Venice?

 

This is an experience on offer for just 50 days this autumn.

Astonishingly, there are only two Canaletto paintings currently resident in Venice – something I have written about for Mary Hoffman’s Book Maven blog. But for this brief and lovely moment in the winter of 2013 you can also see a third: one of his best-known works L’entrata nel Canal Grande e la Basilica della Salute (The Entrance to the Grand Canal and the Basilica of the Salute).

 

 And here is the height of exquisiteness: you can see it in the exact same loggia where, between 1740 and 1745, the artist set up his camera obscura and his easel and sat down to record the wedding cake church of Santa Maria della Salute, the Punta della Dogana, the Palazzo Ducale and the Riva degli Schiavoni. The exhibition is called ‘Gero qua’ – Venetian for ‘I was here’.

 

How did this intimate Canaletto experience come about?

It’s a two-hundred-and-eighty-year old story. The art was of course created in Venice. Lady Lucas and Dingwall was the painting’s first owner. It was then sold to Henry Grey, Duke of Kent. In April 1970 a private buyer acquired it at auction at Sotheby’s in London. Now this philanthropist has lent the painting back to Venice.

In order to make the most of the 50 days, the painting is on display 24 hours a day. A maximum of 8 visitors are admitted each hour. The season sold out immediately.

First, at the appointed time, you enter the Benedictine Abbey of San Gregorio and stand in its courtyard, candle-lit from dusk, to hear the history of the place. Then you are led upstairs to the Canaletto loggia, to look at the painting.

 

We timed it perfectly. We arrived just before four, when the light was dimming, so we first saw the painting in exactly the same kind of light that glows from the canvas. As the guard told us, the painting is thought to have recorded a spring afternoon at around three o’clock. We were seeing the matching autumn light at just the same time.

 

We spent a good half-hour with the painting, shyly approaching it at first, and then becoming bolder. We looked – really looked – in deep searching sweeps of the canvas for once, and then at the scarcely changed reality of Venice behind it. We listened to the guard, who had soaked up the knowledge of hundreds of visitors. He required very little squeezing to let forth a gush of droplets of enchanting facts. He told us that scientists had spoken of tracking the blooms of algae that discolour the canals via this painting; he pointed out that, despite the seeming photographic accuracy of the painting, Canaletto had transposed a couple of angel arms, and had scandalously included only thirteen of Santa Maria della Salute’s sixteen steps.

 

He pointed out how successive renovations of the Palazzo Ducale façade had left it sadly drained of the roseate tones that warm the Canaletto. He told us that with a magnifying glass you could make out the features of the faces of people crossing a bridge in the distant background of the painting. He showed us a sneaky profile peering out from behind a column. And of course he told us about the tiny squiggle of a white cat, right in the centre of everything. (I am afraid my camera is not up to it).

And we – two architects, a writer and a chorister, offered up our own bits of knowledge to the absorbent guard. The Danieli Hotel, we told him, was the old Palazzo Dandolo. And we were fascinated by what used to be beside it: the part now occupied by the hotel’s frightful modern wing. Three higgledy-piggledy houses of straggling heights occupy the site in the Canaletto picture. These buildings were not palaces; they were possibly warehouses: this perhaps explains why they were allowed to be demolished. In front of them stretched a long black awning, perhaps for the cafés that were just starting to feature in Venetian social life in the 1740s, along with a craze for hot chocolate and coffee.

Then the guard urged us to go next door to the room where yielding white sofas awaited us. Lying back, almost swallowed by plump upholstery, we watched the work of cinematographer Maurizio Calvesi, who had filmed the details of the painting using an innovative technique in extremely high definition. The camera swooped over the myriad of intimate encounters that made up the human part of the scene, delivering details of faces and clothing that it was hard to see with the naked eye in the original painting.

The restless camera rendered the orderly Canaletto suddenly noisy and messy with human life: the tall man striding through the centre of the scene appears to be talking to himself, angrily. The shoeshine boy utters his pretty patter to his noble patron, no doubt earning himself a tip as he flourishes his snowy-white rag before setting himself to work on those leather slippers. We felt the thud of bales of cotton being unloaded, the chuckling of the dark liquid inside barrels of wine. We saw the cynical face of a nobleman being petitioned for some favour by a commoner, the bulging muscles of the crippled man struggling up those thirteen steps to pray for his health.

 

Canaletto’s quiet painting was now alive for us: we understood that the artist had also recorded the Venetians, their activities, their work, their sustenance in a way that a writer can only envy. Even the mooring pole to the left forefront of the picture had its story to tell. The water of the Grand Canal was in 1740 so clean as to be transparent. Canaletto showed its outline deep into the water.

Then we came back to look at the real painting again, our knowledge enlarged by what we had just seen. Now the sun had set and the painting glowed in the room, more like an animation than a static piece of art.

Slowly and sadly, we left it, at the guard’s most discreet and regretful mention of the hour. We returned to the courtyard where we were offered drinks, and, most of all, a chance to descend from the almost dopiamine high of utter intimacy with a Canaletto exactly where a Canaletto should be.

 

We strolled around the candle-lit courtyard, where another film of the abbazia was projected onto billowing silk, and then slipped out into the darkness of Venice, quite suffused with afterglow. It was a while before any of us could talk again. If any of us had smoked, it would have been the moment for a shared cigarette and a long, tender sigh.

The evening left me wondering about the physical research we writers do. And how it moves us. I am currently writing Venice in 1737 and so ‘Gero qua’ could not have been a more perfect experience for me. But there are other paintings I love, in galleries in London and Venice, which also deserve the ‘Canaletto treatment’. And can we not almost do it ourselves?

I worked as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute for Art for three years, which gave me access to the gallery as often as I wanted. Why did I not spend my lunchtimes as a devotee in front of any one of the magnificent works there? (Well, because I never had a lunchtime, but even so…)

We could all do this: give a painting what it deserves. What if we dared to go to the National Gallery, or the Courtauld, with a view to seeing just one painting, and thus really seeing it? What if we showed it the courtesy of research into its background before we saw it, so that we knew already what details were important? What if we allowed ourselves the luxury of a whole hour with one work, just the triangle of the painting, the writer and the writer’s notebook, with the writer’s words aiming to draw the past into the present?

Perhaps some of you have already shared such a long moment with a work of art of an object from the past? If so, please share.

 

Michelle Lovric’s website

Her eighteenth-century Venetian novels include Carnevale, The Book of Human Skin and The Fate in the Box.

 

From the Sketchbook: The Colour of Danger

By Teresa Flavin

This month’s sketch is the preliminary drawing for a pen and ink illustration in my young adult novel, The Crimson Shard, set in an 18^th century forgery sweatshop run by a rich and mysterious overseer. An impoverished painter instructs the young forgers on how to cut quill pens from goose feathers and makes them draw animal skulls in ink for practice. When their skills are proficient enough, they begin to forge master drawings and paintings. Obsession, greed and danger are never far from the secret workshop.

Writing about forgers obliged me to find out how forgers ply their trade and this in turn led to research on how Renaissance artists worked. This dark path led straight into the history of paint pigments and their fascinating connections with alchemy.

As a young artist, I gave very little thought to where my materials came from, except perhaps for charcoal sticks, which seemed to come direct from roasting in some fire-pit. It wasn’t until I learned that the pastels I used were possibly poisoning me that I began paying attention. Pastels are powdered paint pigments bound with gum arabic or gum tragacanth into sticks, and their dust can contain toxic substances such as cadmium. With great regret, I gave up pastels and learned how to use other far less dangerous paints.

I benefitted from the development of safer, permanent pigments, but painters of the past had to deal with unstable and poisonous materials. Cennino d’Andrea Cennini, a 15^th century Florentine artist, listed the attributes and dangers of early colours in The Craftsman’s Handbook, translated by Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. For example: “A colour known as orpiment is yellow. This colour is an artificial one. It is made by alchemy, and is really poisonous.” Cennini recommends artists seek other dangerous pigments from “druggists” rather than making it themselves. The medieval apothecary also served as art supply shop. It is not difficult to imagine containers of pigment, some derived from the scales of cochineal beetles or the glands of snails, sitting next to medicines brought by traders from around the world.

On a recent trip to London I visited L. Cornelissen & Son, artists’ colourmen since 1855. Colourmen appear to have traded in London since 1725, providing specialist art materials to artists and hobbyists. The Cornelissen shop bears a distinct resemblance to an apothecary with its numbered wooden drawers and shelves bearing jars of ground pigments and resins. They even supply “early colours” that were used by the ancient Egyptians (including the dreaded Orpiment, as well as Malachite and Realgar, another pigment that Cennini warned against) and the Romans (Verdigris and Azurite).

I was astounded to see a jar on their shelf labeled “Dragon’s Blood Pieces”. Dragonsblood is a pigment said to be the combined blood of dragons and elephants in mortal combat. It is actually a tree-based resin used as a red varnish, brought from India by early sea traders. Cennini advised that “dragonsblood” was “used occasionally on parchment, for illuminating. But leave it alone, and do not have too much respect for it; for it is not of a constitution to do you much credit.”

However enthralling it was to see Dragon’s Blood Pieces (and Dragon’s Blood Powder) on the shelf, I had eyes for one colour only: Vermilion. Cennini gives explicit advice on purchasing Vermilion from the apothecary and on how to work the pigment up, but his description is almost bland. Vermilion is a dramatic colour, not least because it was so perilous to produce, but because of the symbolic meanings of its two main components, sulphur and mercury. Vermilion resulted from the alchemical “marriage” of the complementary elements of Fire (sulphur) and Water (mercury), which also corresponded to Heaven and Earth. Even though vermilion occurs naturally in cinnabar, the pigment made by alchemical processes had great sacred meaning and was integral to the alchemists’ search for the Philosopher’s Stone.

Vermilion has a very hazardous side. Inhaling mercury fumes or the pigment’s dust could debilitate an artist and even kill him. It was not the only pigment reported to have affected a painter. Michelangelo is believed to have suffered from lead poisoning (on top of his alleged gout) and a recent excavation of Caravaggio’s bones suggests he had lead poisoning when he died.

As I stood in Cornelissen’s shop, dazzled by the jars of powdered colours, I thought of the perils artists had gone through to create beautiful work. How many of them toiled through illnesses or died of complications from poisoning? We marvel at the riches they left us, not realising the price they may have paid.

THE CRIMSON SHARD is published in the UK by Templar Publishing. Teresa thanks L. Cornelissen & Son for allowing her to take photos of their premises.