Millais wiki commons

The Blind Girl is a double portrait by John Everett Millais  painted in 1856.  If we look at the work in full, we can see the girls are on a road.  In the middle distance there are pretty little baa lambs frisking happily in the sunshine. In the background an idyllic rural village haloed by an over bright double rainbow. The low viewpoint draws us into the picture, there is no pictorial space between the girls and us, the colours are vivid and warm, the girls are warm in the sunshine, not wet and bedraggled after rain.

A lovely chocolate box image if you ever saw one. This image contains much more than the recommended daily allowance of sugar.

We have no idea if the girls are on their way to the village to be welcomed with open arms by the charitable pink-cheeked villagers or have just been sent away for begging. My own feeling is that the viewer is supposed to believe that the girls are on their way to the village where outpourings of christian charity will prevail and all will be well.

Is this painting a representation of the Victorian poor?
Does it show Millais’s social conscience?

There are those who say that the natural beauty surrounding the blind girl is an attempt to empathise with her plight in showing what she does not have. The picture is purely sentimental; yes, it might evoke a little empathy for the blind girl but it does little to portray the poor as they really were. Does it have the power to take a stab at the Victorian social conscience?

The answer for me is no, this sugary image does not have the reality or political clout of Dickens. Even the dreadful musical versions of Oliver Twist portray the Victorian poor with more realism.

The girls may be dressed in old tatty clothes but they are too clean, too well nourished, too pink cheeked they are too cherub like to ring true. Look at how Millais portrays their hair, they look they should be advertising shampoo, would a poor girl have hair that clean?
The girls look like characters from a Sunday night costume drama, too fat, too cheerful, too energetic, and far too clean to be believable.

If Millais was really trying to stab at the Victorian social conscience, he would have painted the undernourished child chimney sweeps, the workhouse, the farm labourers, the little kids who swept the horse poo off the streets. He does not show us tiny tots in the north of England working 12 hour shifts in dangerous dark satanic mills; told by the kings of cotton that they were lucky to have a job and to think on.

OK, yes, the Victorians gave us education and the beginnings of ‘childhood’ for the poor, but not until 1870.

Millais does a fine job of brushing out the poor. Unlike Constable, Millais actually shows us the poor but in such a sickly sentimental way that is not a true representation. We are not confronted by her she does not disturb us enough. A charity for the poor would fold in a week if they used this image, it fails to engage our emotions, it does not make us angry at her plight. This blind girl is, of course, the ‘deserving poor’ unable to work in the fields or as servant, we are allowed to empathise with her plight.

This image of the poor frees us from the need of a social conscience. This is a ‘poor person’ to hang over the fireplace, a prettified, gentrified, sentimentalised version so we do not have to worry, or put a few coins in a charity box. The subtext being the blind girl and her sister will get to the village and they will be okay.

We can banish the poor from our cities, but they will turn up somewhere else, maybe in rural areas where housing is cheaper, but work and resources are scarcer but, they will still be somewhere.

See full sized image  http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1892P3

The Tories have been accused in recent weeks of an attempt to remove the poor from central London by the introduction of a cap on housing benefits. All this made me think about an artist that the writer John Barrell calls an ‘old style rural Tory’.

Some say this artist is England’s best loved landscape painter; he is, of course, John Constable.

If you are hoping for a nice bit of art appreciation on Constable’s use of light, or the way in which he painted clouds/trees, please look away now.

One of the main problems Barrell and others have with Constable’s paintings is the way in which he depicts the rural poor. To understand where Constable’s critics are coming from we have to look at what was going on in late 18th and early 19th century  England. It was of course a time of great change, with the country shedding off its old paternalistic way of doing things in favour of the launch of a new capitalist society; in sharp contrast to trying to shore up a failing capitalistic society as today’s Tories are.

The Marxist writer E.P.Thompson tells us in his book  The Making of the English Working Class  that the change resulted in a reduction of the poorer members of rural society to the condition of a landless proletariat.

Old style Marxist history maybe, but this is a somewhat different view from the sickly chocolate box paintings, gushing poetry, and prose, which depict the time as ‘Merrie England’.  The same England Thompson speaks of was represented in the arts as a period alive with rosy-cheeked contented peasants doffing their caps to the moral and caring landed gentry with a cheery cry of  ” Gawd bless yer sir!   Yer a luvverly man.”

In reality, the emerging capitalism had brought the danger of class struggle, which unnerved the wealthy, and well it might; the French had taken the matter very seriously in 1789.  Merrie England wasn’t really so merry, especially if you were poor.

What has all this to do with Constable?

Look at his most famous painting The Hay Wain (1821).

None of the figures have very discernable features and the few workers in the fields are reduced to mere specks of paint.

Dorothy Wordsworth, sister to William the poet of  Daffodil fame, writes about a journey at dusk on which she sees groups of workers resting, she tells of the twilight ‘masking the unlovely and the harsh’. This gives a softened view of the workers and masks their exhaustion and ragged clothes; she does not have to recognise their poverty or think about it. The harmony and the picturesque quality of the landscape are not spoilt by the great unwashed: out of sight and out of mind. For Barrell and others, Constable was doing the same thing in his paintings; he was masking the poor from view. We are not allowed to focus on the figures in the Hay Wain (and other Constable paintings) as recognisable real people with identity, lives and a history. To recognise the poor meant that had to be acknowledged; and clearly, they do not deserve to be acknowledged. And so they are depicted, at best, with a brushed out face or merely as a shape bent over a plough or as a blob of paint. Trees and clouds are given the artist’s full attention; poverty-stricken humans are barely painted.

Ironically, Constable is often praised for the ‘reality’ in his paintings; the trees look real, but you are supposed to look at the trees to draw your attention away from the harsh reality of rural poor. These are images of an England that never existed. They depict England as a sunny day, with a happy contented poor, happily working, looked after by caring and responsible nobility. It’s all false; it hides a bitter reality and should be recognised as such. In Ways of Seeing the writer and broadcaster John Berger taught us to look for what is hidden as much as what we see, a lesson, hopefully, not too late for the learning.

The Hay Wain detail.. Wiki commons

For a high quality image see:   http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/john-constable-the-hay-wain
Barrell, J.,1980. The Dark side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840, Cambridge University Press.
Berger, J.,1972. Ways of Seeing, BBC/Penguin.
Thompson, E.P., 1963. The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage.

Biographies : Do they tell us anything about art?
Most famous artists have had dozens of biographies written about them but does learning about the artist’s life tell us anything about the art?

Biographies of artist’s lives started in the sixteenth century with Giorgio Vasari’s magnum opus ‘Lives of the Artists’. The problems started here too, as until that time artists were not very highly valued members of society, no blockbuster shows in those days. Vasari valorised artists and created the myth of the artist as genius. This myth was Vasari’s pet subject, being an artist as well as a biographer he had a double vested interest. Giorgio did everything in his power to advance artists importance and role in society, including reinventing the artist as a special being. The social improvements no doubt did their bank balance a lot of good, but the ultimate aim was eternal fame. Ideas of artists as tortured souls only able to express themselves through the medium of art stem from Vasari’s work. It was all good PR; Caravaggio was cast forever as the bad boy of Baroque due to this kind of mythical writing. Vasari was also less than accurate in the fact department. ‘Lives’ tells the tale of one artist killing another, a nice dramatic story, only his alleged murderer had died of plague four years before the ‘murder’ – clever.

Vasari and writers of biographic accounts conflate the artist’s life and allude to artistic intentions we cannot confirm. We do not have to know how a man lived to see how he painted. We have the evidence in front us every time we stand before a work of art. We do not need to know, or fabricate,  an artist’s intentions.  There is no need to rewrite a life and fit it to a work of art.

We have the work; it is enough.
Mark Twain asserted that biography could only give us ‘the clothes and buttons of a man’.  A biography full of deliberate lies and myth must give us even less.

Few artists have left us with any primary evidence of their intentions or thoughts about their work.  Even Vincent van Gogh’s magnitude of letter writing fails to shed light on some of his work.

Do Vincent’s letters tell us much about ‘Starry Night’?

No, the information is scant, he certainly does not tell us that it is religious painting or all done from memory, but books have been written claiming this as fact.

Myths of the artist as a tortured genius, lunatic, depressive, etc. do not really inform us about the work. Artists do, of course, respond to the cultural and socio-political nature of their times, if you want to get all Hegelian, the Zeitgeist. Picasso is said to have painted Guernica as his reaction to a dreadful act of aggression.

Lives of Artists - wiki commons

Wild assumptions about work and the need of some writers to fit works into their own mythology of an artist abound. These mythologies distract from the work, change the viewer’s relationship with the work and in some cases take over. The artist’s life becomes the reason people go to see the work. Biography is not an accurate method to assess art work; they may be interesting to read, but best taken with a large pinch of salt.

In 1984 Albert Boime a professor of Art History at UCLA , caused quite a stir by suggesting that Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting ‘Starry Night’ was not all about imagination and religion as had previously been thought. Boime asserted that Starry Night was not the work of an isolated lunatic; a bold claim given that van Gogh was in an asylum when he painted it.   In his Essay Van Gogh’s Starry Night: A History of Matter and a Matter of History*.  Biome sets out to prove that Starry Night was a reasonably accurate painting and was astronomically correct, he also dismisses claims that the stars are in some way linked to religion.

We know that Starry Night was painted in June 1889 whilst Vincent was a voluntary in-patient at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy. Theo, his long-suffering younger brother, had arranged for Vincent to have two rooms at the hospital; one was set up as a studio. The large white star near the cypress tree is Venus also known as the morning star. Vincent wrote to Theo in June 1889 telling him that he had seen the morning star before sunrise and that it was very big. The morning star – or Venus – was at the end of an eight-year cycle and being at its brightest in the spring and early summer of 1889 the public were advised to get up early and see it. Vincent was an insomniac so probably didn’t have to make a special effort to get up early to see it.

Biome enlisted help from the Astronomy Dept at UCLA and with their help, he asserted that Starry Night was painted at around 4.00am on the morning of 19th June 1889 – the day Vincent wrote to Theo that he had finished Starry Night.

Back in 1984 you needed a university astronomy department to check out what the sky was like in 1889. Today it is easier so to test Boime’s theory (and because I am a bit of a geek) I turned the date on the excellent free Stellarium software (see http://www.stellarium.org/) back to June 19th 1889. I set the  location  to St Remy, and as we know van Gogh’s room faced east, to an easterly setting.  Vincent wrote to Theo on 19th June 1889 that he had finished Starry Night, so the date is correct. Given that Vincent was looking at the sky from the second floor and through barred windows, we can see that he has squashed the sky a little vertically, but all the sky is there. The white star towards the base of the cypress tree is Venus, the bright yellow star near the top of the star is Hamai with Sheratan above  and to the right, together with the star next to  Sheratan  we have Aries, the first star being lost in the cloud to the left of the tree.  Biome had Aries as Hamia and the two big stars close to the moon, but I think they are more likely to be part of Pisces. The moon is wrong; Vincent has shown it as a crescent not in the gibbous phase it would have been in.   However, there is evidence to suggest he changed this, maybe it just didn’t look right and a crescent moon gave a more pleasing and recognisable  image the moon. We have to remember that there would have been very  little light pollution and the stars would not look as they do in present day cities and towns.

Some say  the cypress trees were an imaginary addition, but Boime produced a contemporary advert for the asylum which shows they were there in Vincent’s time. We also know that Vincent wrote to Theo about  wanting to paint the cypress trees at St Remy, commenting on their colours he was also incredulous that no one had painted them before. The Church steeple is probably imaginary as this type of steeple was not seen in St Remy.  However, we must remember that Vincent was an artist and he was a post impressionist and not confined to impressionist notions of only painting what you see.

The vexed question of the swirling sky is next to be answered, some at MoMA (where the picture now hangs) say that Van Gogh was harking back to art-historical sources namely his love of Japanese wood prints, especially ‘Great wave’ by Katsushika Hokusai .  Biome claims that it is more likely that Vincent would have seen pictures of various comets and constellations, van Gogh did read scientific texts, including work by the astronomer Camille Flammarion who was  very popular at the time.  Biome asserted that the illustrations in such books are closer to the swirling patterns in the sky than the big wave.  Van Gogh also loved maps, Biome claims that Vincent is mapping the stars in Starry Night.

To me the swirling pattern between Venus and Aries seems to resemble clouds more so than comets or constellations, if you look at the swirling pattern, it appears to cover stars.  You can see a faint image of a star through the cloud. I tend to think that Vincent painted them to give a feeling of movement of clouds which resemble both the Great Wave and the images Biome puts forth. The strip of light just above the hills could be the first hint that dawn was breaking – sunrise would have been at about 06.12.

Debates about whether Starry Night and other van Gogh ‘star paintings’ have a religious significance will, no doubt, continue.  I feel that some art historians and critics are unwilling to let go of their notion of van Gogh the tortured, mad, religious genius.

We have no idea what Vincent’s intentions were when he painted Starry Night, all  that we do know is this painting is not  from van Gogh’s imagination.  Vincent did not paint Starry Night adding in imaginary cypress trees and random stars.  It is a record of what he saw out of the barred windows at St Remy in June 1889, not totally accurate maybe, but how van Gogh saw it. He writes to Theo about painting the cypress trees as he sees them, so I think we can allow such a genius a little artistic licence.
* see http://www.albertboime.com/Articles.cfm

For a higher resolution image of Starry Night go to http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/moma/the-starry-night

Art images via Wiki Commons; Images  in public domain.

Click on Stellarium screenshot to open in own window and then again to view full sized.

Starry Night: Vincent van Gogh oil on canvas, 29x36 MoMa New York