Archive

Rubens

Twenty Sixth Approach to Het Steen: 1636.Time and Space (The Usual Stuff of Art)

April 2, 2012
Art Seen, Dogs in Art, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Rubens, the Picture Plane, Time Based Art
Leave a comment

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. 131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Friday Afternoon, National Gallery, London

Sitting in front of this painting, can we recognise a sense of freedom, a release from working to commission? This is, or so we are told in critiques of late Rubens’ landscapes, a painting made entirely for pleasure. It is certainly not one of Rubens’ machines, no muscular quantities of flesh and evident classical narrative.

“Man, why’s there so many dogs in all these paintings?”

“I don’t know, maybe the Brits liked dogs”

“Look there’s one with that man with the gun”

“And see in that one over there, the one with all the fat women, the dog under the tree, and there’s an ostrich!”

“Man, that’s not an ostrich”

“What’s it then?”

“I don’t know, but it’s not an ostrich”

“Maybe that dog will eat it”

“Maybe, then we won’t have to know what it’s called”

The panel is made from many odd sections (twenty apparently), some of the horizontal joins are increasingly obvious. Earlier explanations believed this unorthodoxy showed Rubens adding new parts to the painting as ideas occurred; a genuine development not an allotted task. Recent research (e.g. Christopher Brown: ‘Making and Meaning/ Rubens’ Landscapes’. National Gallery Publications. 1996)  thinks this unlikely. It would be difficult if not impossible to add, prime and work in sections of oil painting, the already worked paint would be disturbed at the very least. Adding sections of panel is not like, for example, Degas sticking on extra bits of paper to his drawings as he expanded an idea.

Edgar Degas: 'Woman Drying Herself', 1880's. pastel on several pieces of paper. 104 x 98 cm. National Gallery, London

The reason for all the small sections then? Rubens was paying for it himself, the artist went for the cheapest option, something knocked up from oddments in the panel makers shop: lots of bits.

But, to be honest, after looking for so long at this large painting in such a public place, I still think it is a public painting, made for this sort of reception. You could say that the strong brown washes (the Burnt Sienna like colour, probably Cassel Earth) over white lead underpaint in the foreground have the effect of lighting the trunk and fallen branches from underneath; like footlights on a stage.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. 131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Detail: The Foreground

I’m sure this has more to do with paint ageing, than a deliberate attempt to reinforce the artificiality of the painted world, far too Post-Modernist. Nonetheless, the fact that one could hold such a notion about the work, emphasises that it was an image made for public consumption.

Was there any other type in this period?  Van der Capelle (looked at in the last post), is often described as a ‘Sunday Painter’ in that, as a wealthy man (the family firm made money in the dye trade: carmine) he did not need to sell his work. Unlike for example Rubens, and like for example, Cezanne supported by his father’s money.

The Ground Plane

Van der Capelle’s paintings look very similar, but I hope my digressions on the ground plane recently showed that something else going on, some wish to follow a line of enquiry. There is none of that same sense of personal investigation about Het Steen, personal display perhaps but not personal discovery. Rubens is not finding anything that he had not known before, unlike Cezanne or possibly van der Capelle.

Look at the ground plane in Het Steen, unlike the van Der Capelle,

Jan van de Cappelle: ‘A River Scene with a Large Ferry and Numerous Dutch Vessels at Anchor’, 1665. Oil on canvas. 122 x 154.5 cm. National Gallery, London.

Rubens ground plane is entirely and deliberately solid, and for a reason. This is land that Rubens would like to us to believe generations of Rubens have traversed; there is certainly an ancient hill fort aspect to our viewpoint. It is also land, Rubens would like us to believe, generations of Rubens will traverse after him; in fact it was sold not long after his death.

“Eurgh, my feet hurt”

“We should really report in”

“What time is the meet?”

“Now”

“Moving on then?”

Timelessness and Pictorial Space

Another question: How does an artist go about creating this sense of timelessness in a scene which, through the contemporary dress of the carter and companion and hunter, is clearly set in 1636?

Answer: the deep pictorial space and elevated viewing point help a great deal. Think of a different painting, Rubens: ‘Samson and Delilah’, which you can just see from the bench in front of Het Steen.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'Samson and Delilah', about 1609, Oil on Oak, 185 x 205 cm. National Gallery, London

It is made by the way, from six very carefully jointed and prepared oak panels, with the grain running perfectly parallel in all of them. Although Samson is a timeless story and the some of the clothes are vaguely timeless, the animal skin notwithstanding, it is set in a claustrophobic now. The long past and future are suitably indicated, but not really part of the show. The contemporary armour helps, but that ‘nowness’ is set, because there are no depths for the eye to travel to, therefore no indicated depths of time for us to wander about in.

The action in Het Steen is in the immediate fore and near mid-ground, the rest of the view though, is equally clearly painted, and clear for us to potter across. It is not though,  the mere scene setting landscape you can see on the flanking Judgements of Paris.

A young man pushes an older man (father?) in a rather splendid wheelchair (all wicker back and cane edged wheels) to position him centrally in front of the painting.

“A view of Het-Stern, whatever a hetstern is”

The older man points with his stick at the horizontal crack running between cart wheel and trunk. They wonder between them what could have caused this. The younger man points out the hunter, the older points to the fallen tree and says:

“I suppose it looked like those once” waving at the oak and birches in the mid ground.

“I suppose so”

The younger man wheels the chair away, he has Rebel Rock Radio embroidered on the back of his shirt, and big head phones around his neck.

This morning I saw some drawings by Robert Bevan (The Camden Town artist better known for his small painting of horses and horse markets) made during time spent in Pont-Aven.

Robert Bevan: 'Poplars by the Road, Brittany',early 1890's, charcoal on paper, 33 x 40 cm.

Heavily influenced by Gauguin, these drawings of trees had enormous energy and strength, not dissimilar now I come to look at them, to the lively forms of the trees the old man has been indicating with his stick. The different areas of sunlight and the curving masses of the painted leaves are full of movement and, well, youth really.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. 131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Detail The Trees

On the other side of the bench, a young man is drawing in his sketchbook, not the usual insipid copying, but strong lines of figures, thick and black and energetic. So different for example to the art student I saw recently, laboriously copying the biro lines made by Boetti’s assistants, and getting them wrong.

Alighiero Boetti: 'Al Mondo Il Mondo', 1972-3. Biro on Paper, 159 x 164 cm. Archivio Alighiero Boetti.

In the Boetti, the biro lines are entirely vertical, in hers they were both horizontal and vertical. Boetti’s ‘Mettare Al Mondo Il Mondo’ series are strong, thought provoking images, a record of the labour involved in making art, hers were not.

The young man behind me continues to draw, I realise that he is drawing people as they walk past, reflecting their vigour in this room (Room 29) of vigorous painted figures. The focus of his drawing is moving round the bench and will get to me soon; time to go.

Twenty Fifth Approach to Het Steen: 1636. Art and Not Seeing.

March 17, 2012
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Rubens
Leave a comment

On the Platform

Waiting at the station, I talked to a man about cataract operations for Labradors, £3000 per eye apparently. It would be cheaper to send the dog to India he thought, but wasn’t sure about quarantine.

The bus to the station had to drive through thick fog, bright but visually impenetrable. Trees are just changes of tone in a wall of grey/ white, like the steam on glasses in a hot bathroom as you clean your teeth before departure.

Art about not seeing

It is rare to find art work that presents a restricted vision. Or, restricted vision as a deliberate theme. You could say that the late work of Monet and Degas, as they struggled with eyesight problems, are the results of restricted vision itself, but I’m not sure Claude or Edgar would thank you for it; not really what they were intending to do. Duchamp’s last work (Étants Donnés) perhaps, where we can only see through the holes in an old door. In most art your eye is directed around pictorial space, yet you are simultaneously aware of the whole work. Think of artist play with mirrors:

Velasquez: 'The Rokeby Venus',1647, oil on canvas, 122 x 177 cm. National Gallery, London

Velasquez’ ‘Rokeby Venus’, what we see in the mirror, (her face), is not what we (the male viewer) want to see, her naked front, although we know that the mirror is in fact pointed at that very form.

“Charlie ruined his IPad yesterday, he rebooted from a PC and it like, wiped all the applications, there is nothing to see, just the empty screen.”

“Why’d he do that then?”

“Don’t know, because he’s a boy? It was great”

What about ‘The Day of the Triffids’, those unable to see on the night of a meteor shower are saved from blindness. They survive deadly killer plants, ending up in the Isle of Wight of all places; is this a metaphor for enhanced perception? Perhaps not. Or the standard ‘blind so that he might really see’ trope (Homer, Gloucester in Lear, Milton etc.) I suppose it’s not surprising that an art work, an object to be seen, is made with visual clarity, and doesn’t concern itself with not being able to see. But art about how we perceive the world and how we see ourselves, there’s lots of that.

“Look, he sent me a text, says he wants a picture of me, not a dirty picture or nothing, just a nice one he can put it in bed at night and see me when he gets up in the morning”

“Nice”

“Yeah, right”

The schoolchildren are opposite, two women in front are discussing their day, they have documents on the table, ‘Rebranding  HLC/ALCs: a New Look’, quiet speech in determined tones, lots more jargon.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. 131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

In front of Het Steen

Behind me a large French youth is lying full length on the bench, earphones on and singing. Next to him, two equally disengaged young men, equally French; all are wearing sportsgear for the non sportif. They comment loudly on the girls that pass. They have yet to turn round and see the Judgements of Paris. I suspect their reaction would be similar to the primary school boys who have just passed, their hands over their mouths, pointing and giggling.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. 131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Detail The Trees

The Trees

The small group of six trees in the foreground island, are reminiscent of a group of people, standing tall. The oak on the left proud and straight, the birches in the centre: lounging, and the birch on the right swaying gently.

I am surrounded by people standing – to look at the art – apart from the lolling French behind. Many viewers take the attitudes of the outer left and right trees. It is only the young in groups who lounge and lean. Do we take the attitude of that we look at? More noticeable when looking at standing figures perhaps, adopting the pose of the Arnolfinis; that sort of thing.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'Landscape with St George and the Dragon', 1630, oil on canvas. The Royal Collection

Pathetic Fallacy

The blasted tree in the ‘Landscape with St George’ now in Tate Britain reflects this sort of ‘pathetic fallacy’ approach, as incidentally do the trees in the later ‘Judgement of Paris’.

Rubens: 'The Judgement of Paris', 1632; Oil on canvas, 139 x 174 cm; National Gallery, London

Those to the left, with the clouds generated by the Goddess of Discord are dark and distorted and forked, echoing the shapes of the Goddess. The tree around which Hermes and Paris and their bovine dog are wrapped, is clean limbed and brightly lit.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. 131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

The scale of the trees in Het Steen really does not fit the figures. Judging from their foliage and form these are mature trees. Yet, stood beside them, the carter or his passenger would reach about half way up the trunk; implausible.

The Tree Question

Is it possible to be a self-conscious painted tree, a form that draws attention to itself?  A question that is not quite as footling as it sounds. Such a question assumes that painted forms in their painted world have mass and agency within that illusory space. A world in which the usual laws of physics, those from our side of the picture plane, still operate.

Perhaps other human traits also apply, the jeunesse dorée behind me clearly believe they are objects of interest. They have positioned themselves and behave to draw attention; admiring attention they assume. I do not share their opinion, but I am in the minority. Their belief, to watch the huge numbers of European and British young moving through the gallery, is shared.

 I wonder if the similarity I see between the composition of the trees and their anthropomorphic nature, comes from proximity. Apart from upright humans standing in front of them, they are flanked by triads of painted standing, naked women. Three goddesses confident in their nudity, conscious of being seen by Paris and Hermes, but not perhaps by us the viewers, or by aggressive young Frenchmen or giggling London primary schoolchildren. Is it possible to ask the question: are the trees in Het Steen aware that they are being watched, without putting my hand over my mouth and giggling?

The Tree Question: Context

The tree question presumes that we read a single standing form as part of a history of single standing forms. Rubens was a classicist, he would have known both something about Greek and Roman statuary and Vitruvius’ descriptions of the classical column as different forms of human figure.

The Classical Orders: Greek and Roman

Here, in these trees we have everything from Doric (the sturdy ‘male’ Oak) through Ionic (the curving birch as a young slender and female) through to Corinthian (The swaying birch on the right as the fuller female figure). John Summerson’s ‘The Classical Language of Architecture’, (Thames and Hudson) is very useful on all this by the way. Rubens would also have been aware of the general belief that Classical stone architecture was derived from wooden building techniques; we are looking at the painting of a building after all.

The Tree Question: Nonsense

But, of course this is all fanciful. The building is Flemish vernacular, look at the stepped gables,

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. 131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Detail Het Steen itself

the only classical references are textual; to Virgil and Horace. The trees are, as I have established earlier, just stock trees from the painters studio repertoire, no reference to anthropomorphism here at all.

More French youth have appeared, an army of them, enough to stock a re-enactment of Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Storming the Barricades’ though without the bare breasted Liberty, much to the disappointment of those on the bench behind. Like Delacroix’s painting the young folk around me are also stock characters, gum chewing, unshaven, louche and aggressive, time to go.

Twenty Fourth Approach to Het Steen: 1636. Structures

March 11, 2012
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Light in Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, the Picture Plane
Leave a comment

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Late night Friday opening at the National Gallery, on the bench in front of Het Steen.

The way pictorial space is organised, the route through the painting that the viewer walks, conceptually as it were, creates our reaction as much as the iconography and the figures. The rectangular surface of this painting appears (almost) to divide into two equal squares.

 The dimensions are 131.2 x 229.2 cm, so in fact each ‘square’ is 131.2 x 114.6. Nonetheless, there is a possible vertical axis, at the central join of the two squares. It goes up between the lines of the silver birch trunks and bisects the two birds, just touches the right hand branches of the of the silver birch on the raised circular area. Each ‘square could be a complete painting in itself, one contains pure landscape, the other contains the house etc.

It seems to be Spanish visitor night in the Gallery, lots of leather handbags and jackets, large family groups with large shopping bags labeled with large names of west ends shops. The Spanish woman behind me has, at last, finished her phone call. Mostly it consisted of ‘Si, Si, Si’ in a manner reminiscent of Sybil Falwty’s ‘Oh I know, I know, I know’

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Detail Horizontal Axis

A horizontal line of light and shade runs across the painting, approximately half way up; although none of these putative lines are exact. This doesn’t just apply to the surface, but divides the structure of the space into quarters

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Detail Numbered Quarters

A contains all the figures

B contains the house

C contains the sky and mid and background

D contains foreground  and the milkmaid with cows and the oversized ducks.

Not much else is organised around these axes. You might for example expect the tower on the horizon, (the Cathedral of St Rombout in Malines) to mark the point where the vertical axis touches the horizon.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Horizon Detail

Or that the tower would be balanced by something on the left, equidistant to the vertical axis; but it isn’t. You could say that the vague branch of the of the silver birch dropping down at about 45 degrees, just touching the horizon, is that balance but I don’t think so, do you? You could say that the orthogonal made by the right hand ditch, just below the milkmaid and cows, will join the horizon where it is bisected by the possible vertical axis.

 As, by the way, does the almost exactly symmetrical orthogonal line made by the front of the house. This again starts from the upright side of the canvas at the same point as it’s symmetrical twin. It cuts the horizon at the same point, where the vertical axis and the orthogonals meet; just about.

A young Spanish couple next to me on the bench are trying to organise English terms,

‘With you…With me…You say I go with you…You come with me…We go on this tour”.

There is much hesitant repetition. Each time they get a phrase right, they kiss. An improvement on my own French language education with Monsieur Hervé. If we declined wrongly he would hit us, rhythmically in time with the right stresses as he repeated the correct form. I can still spell ‘old’ in French as a result, and it still hurts.

In ‘The Science of Art’, Martin Kemp points out that Rubens knew his perspective systems well, although he didn’t use them in an obvious manner. With a bit of effort you could say that underneath this bucolic autumnal dishevelment are some careful pictorial structures.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London. Detail Orthogonals 2

Even more debatable, look at the equilateral triangle made by the fallen trunk, you could say that the dominant lines are parallel with the orthogonals of the ditch and house. Above, as you travel up the vertical axis, is another meeting of orthogonals made from the lower of the ditches and a line formed by the angles of the horses hooves and cart wheels. I.e. a herringbone pictorial construction, that system of depth projection that preceded linear perspective. But in this case, unlike for example the Veronese I was looking at in an earlier post, I think this interpretation would be over-reading the visual evidence.

We can say is that the underlying structure creates a calmness and a logic to the pictorial space, which could otherwise be over-ridden by the figures in the bottom left quarter.

At this point a Spanish couple stand in front of the painting, one behind the other and both exactly on the vertical axis. He is very tall, his face very close to the picture surface. The top of his bright, bald spot, haloed by dark hair just touches the horizon. She is much shorter, her head directly below his, so that where his thinning hair stops hers starts. She is wearing a large brown leather coat that obscures their bodies and she is perfectly positioned so that his legs are obscured also. All I can see is the back of two heads in exact vertical alignment. His head is shining like an extra sun, placed where a less successful painter than Rubens might have positioned a painted version, centre stage.

By now all the other Spaniards seem to have gone, to shops and bars and restaurants. Behind me, a couple have been having a quiet and intense discussion for some time. Something about it is increasingly unnerving, and I can’t work out why. Then I recognise the language, they are speaking in Danish. After two series of  The Killing, I associate that sound, those characteristic stresses and language forms with fear, anxiety and rain. All the suns in the painted world in front of me cannot dissolve that association; time to go.

Twenty Third Approach to Het Steen: 1636

February 21, 2012
Alberti, Art Seen, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Light in Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, Tate Britain, the Picture Plane
Leave a comment

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

It is half term; the National Gallery is full of enthusiastic parents with reluctant children, occasionally vice versa. I have just come from the Courtauld Gallery, partly to see the Ben Nicholson/ Piet Mondrian exhibition, also to visit old favourites: Manet’s ‘Bar at the Folies Bergeres’; Rubens ‘Deposition’ etc.

In front of Rubens landscape: Het Steen, it occurs to me that you could make a strong case to say that Mondrian, even late Mondrian, is also about landscape, certainly about ‘Nature’. As Mondrian wrote:

“It took me a long time to discover that particularities of form and natural colour evoke subjective states of feeling which obscure pure reality. The appearance of natural forms changes, but reality remains. To create pure reality plastically, it is necessary to reduce natural forms to constant elements of form, and natural colour to primary colour. The aim is not to create other particular forms and colours, with all their limitations, but to work toward abolishing them in the interest of a larger unity.”

Much of De Stijl’s philosophy came from splendidly esoteric stuff, like this from Dr. Schoenmaeker:

‘The two fundamental, complete contraries which shape our earth and all that is of the earth, are: the horizontal line of power, that is the course of the earth around the sun and the vertical, profoundly spatial movement of rays that originates in the centre of the sun.’

(‘Principles of Plastic Mathematics’, 1916)

Or from Theosophy, another search for deeper realities largely inspired by the engagingly dubious Madame Blavatsky. Before discovering the lucrative forces of the mind, she is supposed to have been a trick rider in a circus, a piano teacher, and manager of an artificial flower factory. An exposed ex-Spiritualist, apparently descended from Russian nobility, she mixed Western and Eastern mysticism by claiming direct contact with the Goddess Isis. Her writings and teachings were hugely successful and influential, although largely plagiarised. Mondrian later played down the importance of such fakery, but at the time it provided a philosophical underpinning to early De Stijl.

Moving from Cezanne’s ‘Monte Sainte Victoire’ of 1887,

Paul Cezanne: 'Monte Sainte Victoire', 1887

to Mondrian’s pre-American abstractions, e.g. ‘Composition C (no.III), with Red, Yellow and Blue’, 1935

Piet Mondrian: 'Composition C (no.III), with Red, Yellow and Blue’, 1935

and then back to my bench in front of a Flemish autumn landscape, it seems logical to ask if there any obvious similarities, apart from the fundamental theme: man and nature. I would suggest that that ‘Monte Sainte Victoire’ is closer to Mondrian, or the other way round, than it is to Het Steen. The clue to that closeness, to developing Modernism as a whole I suppose, is in their relationship to the picture plane.

Rubens, like all artists before…before when? Manet and the theatrical flatness of ‘Dejeuner sur l’Herbe’, or more likely, Cezanne’s posthumous retrospective at the Salon d’Automne, Paris in 1907. This was where artists like Picasso and Braque picked up the threads that would lead to a pictorial form (Cubism) that was entirely about relationship to the picture plane.

Incidentally, after seeing the ‘Picasso and Modern British Art’ show at Tate Britain, one would have to agree with Wyndham Lewis that Picasso was entirely studio bound. I still think Lewis was little more than an illustrator, a maker of posters to illustrate the importance of Wyndham Lewis in fact, but in that observation he points his finger exactly at Picasso’s limits.

“So, what are we meant to be looking at Mum?”

I think, we need to think about what we want to see next. Right, are we ready? Shall we move on?”

Back to Cezanne and Rubens. Both paintings involve receding planes, framing trees, natural forms at specific angles under light. The earlier artist as you might expect, apparently ignores the picture plane; like all those brought up on the mathematical construction of pictorial space.

Leon Battista Alberti: ‘De Pictura and Elementa’ 1518, from 1435

This world is designed to physically position the viewer, the agency (as it were) happens on both side of the vertical non existency. Whereas Cezanne’s pictorial space is composed of horizontals and verticals that work in exact parallels with the picture plane. That parallel format means that nothing is projected beyond it, the space stops dead at the plane. We can view it from any position, but that is all we are doing: viewing.

“The new vision… …does not proceed from a fixed point. Its viewpoint is everywhere, and not limited to any one position. Nor is it bound by space or time”

Piet Mondrian.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

In Het Steen, the verticals (the trees, the house) and horizontals (lines of the ditches, shadows) operate in relation to the space and the presumed viewer enclosed within that space. They curve according to the depicted topography, the painted world, it seems, precedes our viewing of it. Whereas in ‘Monte Sainte Victoire’ the artist is imposing a method of viewing upon the subject, and that method becomes the subject.

Paul Cezanne: 'Monte Sainte Victoire', 1887. 67 x 92 cm, oil on canvas. Detail

Look at Cezanne’s famous ‘passage’, the repeated, parallel, hatched brushstrokes, strokes that refer us to process, to flatness, to the art work. In Het Steen, brushstrokes (where they are visible) are mimetic, they curve around forms; the curve varying according to what is seen, not how it is seen. Rubens does use parallel brushstrokes, for example blue transparent lines in the willows in the mid-ground, but then, that is how willows grow. Look at the sky above the mountain, Cezanne’s ‘passage’ tells us about the visual tension between two painted horizons/ edges (of the tree and the mountain) and their relationship to the top and sides of the painted canvas. We might also think that this relates to climactic conditions, heat haze for example, but after carefully looking I would suggest structure of the painting comes first.

“O que bello!

“Mamma, Andiamo?”

“Bello”

“Mamma, Andiamo!”

“Uno, Duo, Tre, Hup”

Rubens methods are of course, equally stylised, the intention of his stylisation is to make an apparently neutral world, a world in which each painted space operates to rules we can easily understand. Whereas Cezanne is measuring the distance from each part of the view to…? I used to think it was from each part of the view to the artist’s eye, but after a while in front of this particular Monte Sainte Victoire, I rather think it is from the view to the picture plane.

Next to me, a young Asian boy of impressive width is playing a game on his phone. The game appears to involve building towers, or perhaps cranes. He builds them in a series of different settings, buildings grow as he taps the screen, swiping from right to left with his little finger. Every now and then he does something to collapse the whole scene and start a new one. Sometimes it is at sea, sometimes on land, sometimes mountains.

He changes to a cyclist pouring down narrow bridges across torrential rivers and mountain chasms. The bridges run directly into the picture plane exactly in the centre of the phone screen. The bridges have breaks in them and with his little finger he must make the cyclist jump, or plunge into the abyss. It is all very exciting and he has not looked up once.

I look upward and notice that we are surrounded by small beings with names like Giles and Charlotte and Harriet. Giles is, oddly, given that is about 1 degree outside and drizzling, wearing a light straw hat, large bushes of blond hair push out beneath it, enough I think rather grumpily to spare for those of us of a slightly older vintage; time to go.

Twenty First Approach to Het Steen: 1636

December 22, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Looking at Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, Tate Britain, Whitehall
Leave a comment

Peter Paul Rubens: 'Landscape with St George and the Dragon', 1630, oil on canvas. The Royal Collection

On first sight, I thought that the two blasted oaks in the newly exhibited Rubens: ‘Landscape with St George’ at Tate Britain were closely related to the foreground clump in Het Steen. On sitting in front of the latter, I think probably not.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

From a generic stock of trees perhaps, but not the same. In Het Steen the trees are sturdy/ healthy, whereas, deliberately/ iconographically in the St George they are all peeling bark and thinness. That Flemish bent silver birch – with a bend to the right – seems surprisingly unconvincing today, particularly when compared to the carefully painted fruiting tree with the weeping tendency in the centre.

Stock Figures

Unlike St George and the Princess, these stock figures (the carter and passenger and the hunter) look suitably lumpen and graceless. Even more so in comparison to the apotheosis of St James 1st, in Rubens’ Banqueting House ceiling in Whitehall. Gestures and poses derived from Michelangelo and others would clearly have no place in such a personal landscape.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'The Apotheosis of James 1st'. The Banqueting Hall, Whitehall

Thinking further about stock figures: in Trafalgar Square in a parallel line to the front of the National Gallery, as I came in there was, counting from the left:

An amplified violinist playing either ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ or possibly ‘Don’t Fence Me in’, not easy to tell

An entirely silver man

A Charlie Chaplin

A man dressed in Union Jacks held on by rubber bands and sellotape, his thematic purpose was unclear

An entirely gold man

A Shrek, or rather a fat man in ordinary clothes with a beer can in one hand wearing a green rubber Shrek mask

Two young men playing noodling jazz on a double bass and a saxophone, no tune was obvious here.

All the dressed figures stood on wheeled tool boxes. These metallic men seem to have their iconography relatively fixed: the all over spray; a non-descript hat; the plain slightly industrial clothing; often with mock rubber bare feet; always a very large nose. They seem to have no relation to, for example, the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, what is their ultimate derivation I wonder? When I first saw them, many years ago in front of the Pompidou centre, these figures where completely static, living statues. Now, they make sweeping arms movements to beckon in children to stand next to them and be photographed. They have moved, as it were, from skills based activity to a form of celebrity; proximity rather than admiration is the current role of the viewer, although no one wants to stand next to the increasingly belligerent Shrek.

Het Steen

In front of the painting I keep coming back to a different version of that question: there must be more to our interest/ enjoyment in the painted representation of depth than admiration of skill, of a magic trick. It is always enjoyable to find a specific skill, but once you have seen it a few times the trick becomes less entrancing; not so here, painted depth always seems to excite. It must be more than just the daydreaming of an internal spectator, walking the illusory fields that holds the eye? More than the urban enjoyment of a lost rural scene? More than the joy of looking at something celebrated by others?

An animal or bird is always aware of what is above its horizon, that’s why dogs can react so strongly to hot air balloons, and a few dirigibles floating in this Flemish dawn would not look out of place. Something floating just on your skyline is threatening, think of small birds looking out for birds of prey. Do we delight in representations of a clear horizon because of some sort of atavistic pleasure: our way is clear, we dominate the land in the same way that we dominate the pictorial space?

“Daddy, can I do some drawing and draw the Mona Lisa?

When you get home you can

I don’t want to go home”

Or am I just overcomplicating something very simple? The reactions of my fellow viewers seem straightforward: the colours harmonise in a pleasant manner, the view looks nice and we like a view for the same reason we like the painting of a view: ‘it takes us out of ourselves’.

Two very young Spanish boys are running around the bench and choosing which section to jump on, chasing each other round a safe landscape I suppose; time to go.

Twentieth Approach to Het Steen, 1636: Het Steen and George Shaw and Bin Enclosures: the ‘Objectness’ of Art.

December 14, 2011
Alberti, Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, The Baltic, the Picture Plane
Leave a comment

 

Peter Paul Rubens: ‘A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’, 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Four girls are sitting on the bench in front of Het Steen (part of a school group, Year 11 at a guess). One is sketching in an A6 book with a big red ribbon on it. They debate whether it is really annoying, or not, that different galleries have different policies for taking photographs. They fall to looking at Google Maps on their phones.

“No, look, we are here right”

“No but like, what’s that bit there?”

In ‘The Art of Describing’, Svetlana Alpers describes Northern landscape paintings as a mapping of terrain rather than the (Italian) representation of an idealised scene. She usually holds Rubens up as an example of Italianate influence and in Het Steen the foreground, with its stock figures and grand, illuminated house fits this description well. In the mid/ background though, the raised mound on the horizon acts more as destination than vanishing point. In that sense, you feel you could walk or ride in your cart along one of a series of well-established routes to the central church tower that just pierces the sky (the Cathedral of St Rombout in the town of Malines). Like the Google Map directions, you half expect a hovering blue arrow to point to an area of trees and then, disconcertingly, relocate the whole image through 90 degrees when you tilt the phone too much.

“I actually like the curves in it; I could really imagine rolling down that hill”

“It reminds me of that time we had to go on a cross country run and we got lost and had to ring up your mum”

“Shall we go now?”

“I can’t, my legs are stuck to the seat”

Alpers further characterises the fundamental differences between ‘Italian’ and ‘Northern’ pictorial space. As we know, Italian art after Alberti/ Brunelleschi  works with a mathematically defined, illusory box existing behind a transparent picture plane. It is the relationship of forms to the vanishing point and to the static, monocular viewer whose visual cone that plane bisects, which brings all this art into play. The fundamental intention is to create a unified, harmonious space between the viewer’s eye and the centrally defined infinity.

Whereas, she says, in Northern art forms are arranged in aggregation, the eye rests in a series of discrete movements around the pictorial space, movement defined by each composition, not by mathematical convention. We see each aggregation sequentially, not in one whole look. Italian represents something already known, usually known in words, Northern art is the act of describing existing objects and places through making images.

The Turner Prize at the Baltic

I have recently been to Newcastle to see the Turner Prize exhibition at the Baltic. Karla Black was the outstanding artist for me, although it was clear that the insider, with his modish re-working of early Modernism would win. This theme was all over The Venice Biennale this year; a clever bit of positioning by Martin Boyce. I had been looking forward to seeing George Shaw’s work, to seeing his paintings as real objects, rather than digital images or print.  I was surprised to find them disappointing, perhaps a comparison with Het Steen will begin to describe why.

Shaw does not, strictly speaking, make landscape paintings of a Coventry housing estate. He makes paintings of his photographs of a Coventry housing estate. That distinction is important. Look at his images and you see a visually sophisticated eye at work; an eye that is clearly well trained in photographic technique: framing; cropping balancing, depth of field; viewpoint. So that when he comes to make; ‘Resurface’ for example, a lot of the decisions have already been made. There is a formal cohesion to them, a unity that denies the tentative snapshot nature of the subject.

George Shaw: ‘The Resurface’, 2010, enamel on board

If we take one key image to stand in for the whole of his display: ‘Resurface’. Like all the others, it tends to symmetricality, look at the orthogonal created by the ‘On/ No’ device on the tarmac. This is not the sudden, deliberately non picturesque, glance of Pissarro for example. It is not, despite the advance publicity, the aggregated contents of a described landscape. If you base your pictorial space so firmly on Albertian principles, your audience will make certain assumptions; we are all familiar with these traditions, there are no real surprises anymore.

The Bin Enclosure and Art

Arranging bin sheds/ garages in this way cannot be called transgressive; we are not being challenged by the composition, rather, we are being reassured. ‘Resurface’ is a great topic, what should the housing association that owns this area of Tile Hill North do with these old sheds? Knock them down and build something useful? Wicker bin enclosures seem very a la mode these days, and the bin enclosure is a real problem for contemporary social housing design. George Shaw shows an institution not getting to grips with issues; slap on new coat of paint, put new tarmac down and ignore it.

Shaw’s paintings speak to something very appealing to the large crowds visiting the Baltic. These images seem to place themselves on a continuum that runs from the Haywain at one end, to ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ at the other. We can recognise ourselves and our lives in these small familiar scenes, as far as this audience is concerned there is a substantial, and affirmative process at work. The Lords of High Culture have recognised us and thought us worthy; “God has seen everything that he had made and behold, it was very good”. But note that the hymn (Words: Cecil Alexander: ‘Hymns for Little Children’ 1848. Melody: 17th Century English folk tune arranged by Martin Shaw, 1915)  continues:

‘The rich man in his castle, 

The poor man at his gate, 

 He made them, high or lowly, 

And ordered their estate.’

Look at ‘Resurface’ and the receding planes, directly parallel to the picture plane: the sheds/ a fence at the left on a scrubby grass verge/ leafless trees/ a house and in the far background more trees. These trees indicate Tile Hill Wood, one of the last remnants of the Forest of Arden, a nature reserve since the 1930’s, now rather overgrown with holly. The setting for Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, pastoral romance and courtly love, all ending happily amongst the rich and powerful: Orlando carves poems to Rosalind on trees, Coventry youth paint their names on brick walls. Apart from the neatness of the interconnections that you would expect from a successful contemporary fine artist, there is an underlying nostalgia: warm and softening. We feel comforted, we accept our lot and go home thinking of British sitcoms.

The Raleigh Chopper Mk 1

In this cosy glow, we wonder whether the internal spectator for this work could perhaps be the proverbial man out walking his dog, a man who had once who been a 1970’s youth on a Raleigh Chopper bike (first released in the UK in Christmas 1969, made in Nottingham) when these sheds were in their prime. Tile Hill North was a post war estate, a new utopian future, open plan with views and walks to the surrounding woods. Employment from the new Massey Ferguson factory turning out tractors: new forms of housing and new forms of agriculture and new ways of treating nature for new futures. What we see now is entropy and ennui, decay has been unsuccessfully resurfaced, the structures themselves have not been re-worked, just given new double yellow lines to keep them in their place.

Peter Paul Rubens: ‘A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning’, 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Back to Het Steen

By and large Het Steen is descriptive, a specific place at a specific time of day and year: although it is redolent of ownership. We can see that through viewpoint, a raised position familiar from Patinir and earlier Flemish landscape painting. In this later work we are either an all-seeing God, or possibly a presumed absolute Stuart monarch, or perhaps we are seeing the landscape from the square crenelated tower you can just see to the right of the house: a reworking of the exact topography to emphasise the notion of ownership. Such a reworking displays the extent, the scale of the land that comes with the manor of Het Steen.

Shaw also re-presents and describes a particular landscape with a strong underlying narrative, why was seeing Shaw’s actual paintings unfulfilling? After all, in reproduction his works look very fine indeed. But the real things seem diminished, they were either too small, lacking the power that scale should bring in this context. Or, they were too large and could perhaps been bright jewels; elegant and perfect. Each approach in direct and telling visual contrast to the actuality. In fact the paintings lie very flat to the wall, dull of surface and demanding very little for the eye.

‘Resurface’ and the painted surface

It is the painting as object that matters in this context, and the surface quality in particular. In Het Steen we see a grand statement, as an object it is a glorious thing, of a piece with what it represents. The paint surface is layered and, despite the best efforts of the National Gallery lighting scheme, lively, vital, light catching on the foreground trees and the vertical fold of the hunters sleeve for example.

In common with the lack of clarity between their pictorial space and their subject, Shaw’s paintings have a muddy, unclear set of tonal values, based in ‘Resurface’ on a sharp Viridian green. Every single mention of George Shaw must, by legal decree I assume, talk at length about the medium he uses. Again a brilliant USP: Humbrol enamel. The reader immediately thinks of craft practice; obsessive hobbyists in adolescent bedrooms; that soft nostalgia again. Enamel lacks the apparent depth of oil paint, there are no evident layers of varnish in Resurface and the shine sits on top of the surface. Oil paint appears to contain tangible highlights as well as reflect light through different textures; those layers of glaze/ varnish and consistency present forms of depth to the viewer. Enamel can’t really contain texture, it just provides a uniform shine, again thematically suitable, but as interesting as looking for a long time at the surface of an Airfix model or perhaps the gleam on a slightly muddy Mark 2 Raleigh Chopper. It is interesting how much the digital version provides the depth that is missing in the object.

The four GCSE artists have gone, I now realise that during the twenty minutes, at least, I heard them on the bench, not one of the girls said ‘Oh My God’, or it’s diminutive ‘OMG’. These things ought to be noted.

Beside me in bulky tweed called, I think, a covert coat, and balancing a rather fine Brown Derby hat on his knee, a man keeps consulting first one mobile phone from the left pocket, then the right. After a while he calls from one of them.

“Hello, Hello, I’m trying to get hold of Gerrard…I came in just after one to meet him…it’s now after 3…it’s all very interesting, but I don’t know what happened to our rendezvous”

I leave him surrounded by huge numbers of French children with clipboards. Our tweed clad gent is talking about ordering a meal from M and S, he places his hat on his head to protect him from youthful Gallic indifference.

Nineteenth Approach to Het Steen 1636

November 19, 2011
Alberti, Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, Light in Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, the Picture Plane
Leave a comment

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Alberti defined seeing a painting as looking through a window but, you can look out of or into a window. Looking at pictorial space is a reciprocal process. Norman Bryson (‘Vision and Painting’, page 96) points out that the viewer’s space, on this side of the picture plane, has differed over time. The dramatic liturgical theatre of Byzantine Christendom; you approached the image in a full architectural setting with aural context. You moved from devotional icon to icon in a set pattern, at a particular time of the year, according to prescribed physical ritual accompanied by prescribed sounds and of course smells, incense etc. The contested piazza of the Renaissance self; always measuring, always calculating proportion, always negotiating a better deal with God. The pure white cube of the fiercely convinced, Protestant communicant. The contingent world of the modern being, a fluid range of virtual selves, constantly subject to a vast choice of undifferentiated stimuli.

Perhaps I was aware of this as I took my usual place in the National Gallery, on the bench before Het Steen on a Friday evening. Perhaps it was because, on leaving the Leonardo exhibition, I had seen Professor Martin Kemp (the international authority on da Vinci) in the Gents, prepping himself for his evening talk. He was dressed in a blinding white, collarless linen frock coat, buttoned to the neck. The neckline was giving him problems and took time to adjust – much fiddling and staring into the mirror. I last saw him, in the flesh, at a talk some 8-10 years ago. He seems curiously ageless, although his hair, then a dazzling black, now has shades of deeper red; we know he’s worth it. Outside, he is greeted by attendant young women in flowing dark tailoring, they whisk him away to bathe his brow in perfumed oils; aah the life of the eminent art historian.

Perhaps it was because the Leonardo show was so crowded (only a three hour queue to buy a day ticket, time quickly lost in explaining the processes of Christianity to a puzzled Malaysian Economics student struggling with terminology in the exhibition hand-out). An exhibition crowded with a certain class of person, fragrant is the term I think, modulated voices and modulated décolletage on show as well; parties to go to I suppose.

Perhaps this was why I was more than usually aware of others as I sat in front of Rubens’ joyful autumn.

A Study of Hand Gestures in Front Of Het Steen

Older hands are often clasped behind the back, male tending to one hand holding the clenched other. Female hands seem to be relatively open. Younger hands tend to hold digital devices in front or to the side, or carry bags, handbags or labelled shopping bags.

A couple walk past, constantly changing their hand grasp with each other, sometimes fully entwined fingers, sometimes laid palm in palm, sometimes holding little fingers as though they are about to pull a wishbone. They read the label, ignore the painting.

 

“It’s very nice, this landscape, quite a size, but just a bit big for our lounge”

Two women, middle aged, one in a pale pink cardigan, the other all in black. They are clearly absorbed by the painting and keep making paired movements, each pushes her hands together from a height about nose level and moves them down to about the waist, mostly whilst pointing to the carter and the house.

Three very small Japanese women/ girls (difficult to tell) make small dabbing movements as they point upwards to the painted sky; dab, then circular movement, dab, then circular movement. They stop, hold up their phones, standing like the three graces (two facing the work, one away from it) they each consult their mobiles, this uplights their faces with a delicate blue glow. Whatever they find, it returns them to the painted sky, more very careful anti clockwise gestures, this time with thumb and forefinger; precise and in a single plane.

The digital light from the three graces glowed briefly across the silver birches in the paintings foreground. The painted highlight on those top branches is frontally lit, as though a film crew had rigged up towers and put full spots –no coloured gels – onto the upper parts, prior to some swooping camera shots across the plain. But the sun, pale straw yellow, but yellow nonetheless, comes from the right hand horizon behind the trees. That the sun is low is clear from the sight and intensity of the shadows cast by trees in the midground; surely the trees should be in silhouette and dark at the top?

Young couple in matching anoraks stand with an arm around each other’s back. With her other hand, she takes out her chewing gum, examines it, rolls it between her fingers and pops it back in her mouth.

White haired, large middle aged man to equivalent companion, pointing with fleece clad arm whilst sat on the bench.

“Frank, what’s that building”

Frank gets up, looks at the label, waves his arm slowly in front of the painting in a horizontal manner

“It’s Birmingham”

A very large class of students appears, to draw the right hand Judgement of Paris, all hats and boots and tights. They carry A3 black sketchbooks, Seawhite’s finest held in front of them like protective shields, or perhaps devices to declare their allegiance. Time to go.

Eighteenth Approach to Het Steen 1636

November 2, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, National Gallery, Rubens
Leave a comment

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

Is this a moral landscape? I have been reading ‘Gainsborough’s Vision’ by Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson (Liverpool University Press, 1999) in which the authors describe the role of the emblem in Gainsborough’s landscapes. Emblems were moral tales told through images, always accompanied by a descriptive text. An important Dutch form, travelling to Gainsborough through the Calvinist/ nonconformist tradition. A key early source was Otto van Veen: ‘Amorum Emblemata’ (1608) and the ‘Amoris Divini Emblemata’ (1615)

Otto van Veen: 'Amoris Finis Est' Amorum Emblemata 1608

“Van Veen is faithful to what can be termed a northern style of imagery – a detailed and naturalistic rendition of landscape settings. He presents a moral dilemma in a more or less realistic, rather than as an idealistic, single quality”  

(Gainsborough’s Vision page 82)

Rubens was apprenticed to Van Veen, and would have absorbed the tradition. Despite the different scale, materials and function, in Het Steen we have some of the possible elements of an emblem: the cart; the hunter; the house and the elegant bystanders. But:

1/ we don’t have any improving text

2/ Calvinist/ Christian images of agriculture tend to refer to husbanding the land as post Fall/ post Edenic toil:

‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Often shown through the image of a thistle:

‘Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field’

There are no thistles, some brambles of a fairly beneficent kind, they act as a cover to the hunter, but no obvious thistles. More importantly there is no ploughing, no evidence of turning the cursed ground, not a ploughed field in sight; it is pasture as far as the eye can see. The only work seems to be the bucolic acts of milking/ hunting and riding a cart. There are no crops, apart from milk and the wild fruit on the tree.

The hunter: in 17th century emblems, the hunter tends to be a reference to Cupid, eg Philip Ayres: Emblemata Amatoria, and ‘The Hunter Caught by his Own Game’, Actaeon changed into a Stag, that sort of thing.

Philip Ayres: 'The Hunter Caught by his own Game', Emblemata Amatoria, 1683

Frankly, most of the emblems tend to refer to getting love/ sex wrong, the same use that Gainsborough makes of them as well. Nor is Rubens’ man a metaphorical hunter searching for some other form of meaning. The deer on the cart would lead us to think about stag hunting, the pursuit of the aristocracy. Apparently Rubens did not hunt himself, and problems with arthritis and gout during the five or so years that lived at Het Steen would have limited his mobility.

Can we construct a moral tale out of these elements? Not, I would suggest without some heavy guidance from the composition and the authorial voice, Rubens was after all on the wrong side of the Catholic/ Calvinist divide. Despite early work with van Veen, the Counter Reformation/ Classical tradition is likely to be his source; Virgil’s Georgics, not Genesis. You can, as Asfour and Williamson do, plausibly connect Gainsborough landscapes to morally improving tales, can’t quite make that connection here.

Thomas Gainsborough: 'Landscape with a Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid', 1755 (Tavistock Estates)

Next to me on the bench, a father and his daughter, she is 6 or 7 maybe, are going through a worksheet on the painting. They carefully read the question together, she skips to the image and points out the number of birds, people, where the sun rises or whatever. She is entirely dressed in shades of pink, with a diamante necklace and those trainers that light up when you walk. They stay looking at the painting, counting off the questions for a very long time, completely absorbed. Longer even than the Chinese tour groups in front of the right hand ‘Judgement of Paris’; today they are mostly dressed in lightweight tweed.

We could advance the theory that, at the end of his life, Rubens is celebrating God’s creativity with his own. But there is no obvious evidence of Christian agency here, no attributes or idealism of the humanist inspired Roman Catholic for example. No old bearded man in a bed sheet appears to bless us all, no youthful Apollonian sun-god races across the sky either. This, then, is all materialism: I own; I observe; I deserve, because I am worth it (which of course Rubens was).

A kinesthetic learner, the term we have been taught to use, is being urged by his mother to complete the Het Steen worksheet. The small boy, Dutch at a guess, is whirling his arms around his head, sucking the toggles of his fleece, jumping from foot to foot, trying to pull his mother’s pony tail, pointing at the ducks in the sky and shouting; all at once. To my right, the whining conversation between the two guards has become much louder. The man on the bench behind me is starting to snore and another, very large Chinese tour group is bearing down on the naked threesome to judge them for themselves; time to go.

Seventeenth Approach to Het Steen, 1636

October 22, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens
Leave a comment
Leonardo da Vinci: ‘Mona Lisa’, 1503 -19

I once heard Martin Kemp, the great Leonardo specialist, talk about the geology in background of the Mona Lisa. Apart from surprise at the blackness of the distinguished professors hair, I remember him saying that the artist had been hired to survey the land between Florence and Pisa, to give Florentines a navigable waterway to the sea bypassing their rivals. That survey work, and Leonardo’s analysis of the role of water in changing topography, allowed him to think of time in different ways, to move away from the prescriptive Christian chronology; geological time for example. His proposed route was to go through Prato and Pistoia, although the land behind Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini is not an exact portrait of the lakes above the great valley of the Arno, it bears similarities. It allows Leonardo to use the landscape to meditate on the role of time, as well as present the site for a pre combustion engine form of transport, that is now incidentally the route for the A11 from Florence to Pisa.

What transport routes are we looking at in Het Steen?

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

What geology? What time span? Apart from the obvious track leading the horses and cart out to our left, what other forms are here and what do they tell us about Rubens’ thinking? There are tracks in the centre midground, serpentine, leading toward the horizon, lighter in colour than the green and possibly slightly frosted grass that surrounds them. Several tracks seem to come together here, to lead in to the space towards Malines (the town on the horizon). They are not large roads, nor direct.

This is presumably an alluvial plain, laid down over millennia by slow moving rivers, they are not the fast moving lakes of built up water, about to burst their banks and cause tumultuous change as represented by Leonardo. Het Steen is placed in a land where not much changes, not of course true, this was a sector of Europe that had been constantly fought over, the Northern Netherlands were at war with Spain right up until 1648, and we are in the middle of the Thirty Years War. Land reclamation to the north and west was at its peak, new canals being dug constantly, agricultural practices were changing fast to keep pace with growing urbanisation.

Viewing it now, this great flat plain stretching to a low horizon, looks just made for a 21st century motorway system: 6 lanes; gantries; illuminated signs throughout the night; those huge, double European lorries. In fact it has the A1/E19 running from Brussels to Antwerp, which apparently has one of the widest central reservations in Europe (40 metres wide over 31 km since you ask)

The hunter in the foreground, the stock figure, he is trying to move to his right, to go around the tree trunk, through the thickest part of the brambles to shoot the oversized ducks behind. Surely, his quickest path would be to his left? Or so our elevated viewpoint would seem to indicate. It would be easier to shoot the ducks from the left hand side of the trunk, he could just hit them with his great long barrel in fact.

“It must be fairly late”

“In the day?”

“No, in the History of Art, you look at that Renaissance painting over there and the trees aren’t half as green”

“True”

“What’s the best way to get to our hotel anyway?”

The brown foreground of the painting ends at a very strong horizontal line, tilted down slightly to the left. One’s eye first notices it at the right where it is marked by a drainage ditch, the field boundary for the cow field with the milkmaid, although there are more cows in the field beyond as well. The pure sunshine continues across the midground, a line of sunlight ends just in front of the house. This lets Rubens spotlight the house, placing it on a boundary edge, the left corner of sunlight exactly touches the left hand end of the mansion.

The later Judgement of Paris to my right is a constant draw for Chinese visitors, in huge numbers. They stand today in Burberry scarves, usually their leader has one of those microphone affairs, they never stay long, they have an itinerary to follow.

I’m intrigued to know where the rustic wooden bridge would lead anyone to. If it is for the milkmaid approaching the cows in the next field but one, then two questions occur:

  1. Would the bridge bear her weight and that of the milk she will carry? Presumably in another of the brass jugs like that on the cart, and the same balanced on the head of the girl in Landscape with a Rainbow, the companion piece to this (see previous post). If you look closely at the smudges of paint, the milmaid would appear to have something on her back with a highlight, a jug strapped there? The bridge is flimsy with only one handrail, in a list of ‘Bridges in Art’ (Hiroshige, copied by van Gogh; Monet; Sisley; Constable; Turner; Stella; there is of course a bridge in Mona Lisa, on the right, just where her clothing swirls across her bare shoulder; that poem by McGonagall, the Tay Bridge Disaster etc. Any more? I refuse to sing Bridge over Troubled Water in the National Gallery) in that list, this little wooden span is not the most convincing.
  2. The milkmaid would have to cross another bridgeless ditch to get from her cows to this one, is that right? Then she would have a long walk round the wrong way to the house. That route would take her to the front and the drawbridge as well. Would servants go in that way? Was the drawbridge the only way over the moat around Het Steen? Perhaps there was a loading place for milk and the cart, by the tall foreground trees? Evidence of growing rural industry?

The last time I was here, someone was drawing the earlier Judgement of Paris in pencil. Today, an elderly man, quite scruffy in a grubby brown jacket, trainers, battered grey rucksack old jeans is drawing Minerva from the same painting. She is the figure with her back to us, with armour at her feet. It is a copy with a high degree of accuracy, and he is making it on an Ipad. Minerva, in the digital drawing, is completely isolated on a pale blue grey background. The digital drawing has a definite sense of texture from the ‘tooth’ of a virtual surface, Ingres paper is the name of the physical paper with equivalent qualities.

I see all this as I leave, finding my own path past the Turners and Constables, all that power and paint as thick as the painted skeins of cloth on Lisa Gheradini; seized moments of meteorological time.

 

 

Sixteenth Approach to Het Steen 1636

October 13, 2011
Art Seen, Het Steen, Landscape Art, National Gallery, Pictorial Space, Rubens, the Picture Plane, The Wallace Collection
Leave a comment

To the Wallace Collection to see Rubens’ Landscape with a Rainbow’ , 1636.

Peter Paul Rubens: 'Landscape with a Rainbow', 1636. Oil on Panel. The Wallace Collection, London

the companion to Het Steen. It is much less finished, look at the way the yellow blocking between the legs of the cart horses on the left has entirely covered the second horse, it has not been corrected; Rubens never got round to it. Underpainting and drawing clearly showing through.

Strong diagonal from middle right across the ground plane towards the centre. A surprisingly incoherent composition, not quite clear where the central pond begins or ends. It is in the centre of the painting, but is just a vague hole.

Very little accuracy in the trees, oak like, but without the precision of the birches and the oak in the Steen foreground. In the left mid-ground of Rainbow there is a vaguely birch like copse, some clarity in the background recession.

Carefully painted cattle and ducks, brown foreground, green mid, blue background seen from a slightly elevated viewpoint but not as high as Steen. Without the house we have less of the arrogance,, or showing off, that characterises Steen. Rainbow is far more of a genre painting about countryside activities i.e. Haymaking, bringing in the cattle, no doubt killing the ducks; activities in the Brabant. The ground plane rises relatively steeply from below our feet to a midpoint at the grown out hedgerow.

Is the rainbow a sign of the covenant, God will not break his promise? A sign of peace (relevant of course to Rubens own position), look at the way our eye is drawn from the dark right towards the brighter left. Is the rainbow a symbolic form in common with the genre figures?

In the National Gallery in front of Het Steen

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

There is perhaps a compositional similarity between Steen and Rainbow, in that both have a dark diagonally composed foreground element in roughly the same place; a standard Flemish landscape component after all. The Rainbow haystack corresponds approximately with the position of the house, but only just; positions of plenty?

Looking again at the Steen foreground clump of trees, might that dominant tree on the left be a pine rather than an oak? Native pine has lower branches that come out at a 45 degree angle, in oaks they tend to be higher up and at 90 degrees to the trunk. But, it can’t be, the leaves are bulging groups of flora, not short dark needles at all.

The Rainbow figures owe more to The Watering Place, 1622

Peter Paul Rubens: 'The Watering Place', 1622. Oil on Panel, The National Gallery, London

than they do to Het Steen. The Watering Place is on the opposite wall to het Steen, it is a far more finished painting than either of the two later works. Specimen pollarded willows, edged with dark glazes and trembling waves of Italianate leaves on Northern European tree trunks. Bruegel like rocks and tree formations, elevated viewpoint and the usual colour division to the composition. Genre figures including peasant with brass pitcher on head and shepherd playing flute under the tree (lots of references to Virgil: Tityrus lying under a spreading beech wooing the muse on a slender reed etc) None of that obviousness in Steen, which is an ostensibly contemporary scene in which the season is established as much through light and colour as through content. Autumn, ie harvest time, is established by content and activity rather than through depiction and observation.

It is toward the end of the day in the National Gallery. Sino-Italian day by the look of it: elegant; elderly; attenuated Italian couples and younger, plumper Chinese family groups. The elderly Italian man next to me on the bench, in light brown wool jacket, grey trousers, slip on brown leather shoes, light smell of woody eau de toilette, has been asleep on the corner seat of the bench the whole time I have been here. The colour of his jacket almost exactly matches the bottom right glazing over the underpainting of Het Steen. A woman, in folds of fine grey wool, with tumbling hair full of gold highlights and gold necklaces, re-appears to wake him up; lots of whispered Italian. Is gold an autumnal colour?