A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma

It’s one of the most remarkable paintings in the whole of western art – it’s Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, sometimes known as The Arnolfini Wedding, painted in 1434. It’s one of my favourite paintings, one of the great draws in London’s National Gallery.

It’s remarkable in two senses: for the freshness of Van Eyck’s vision, the intensity of the detail, for the range of objects that might mean something, might have some symbolic significance, or might mean nothing at all, other than that they are objects in a well-appointed room. It’s remarkable also for its remarkable history, passing through the hands of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons into those of Joseph Bonaparte, whose bottom was placed on the throne of Spain by big brother Napoleon. Joseph, I was delighted to discover, was called Pepe Bottles – Joe Bottles - by his less than enamoured subjects, so known for his prestigious intake. Looted by a British officer from the dipso royal’s baggage after the Battle of Vitoria in 1813, the Arnolfini Portrait eventually made its way into the National Gallery.

More than any of this it is remarkable for its subject, a prosperous Flemish merchant couple, the first depiction of ordinary people, people who were not aristocratic or royal, just the middle class from the Middle Ages. It celebrates property, of course, it celebrates domestic comfort and wealth, as other paintings celebrate the landed wealth of the nobility.

But still there is a wonderful immediacy and homeliness to the painting; we know these people in their sheer ordinariness; we can identify with them as real human beings, not some grand statement about power. There is also an abiding mystery about this intense little oeuvre, a sense of otherness which raises all sorts of questions. It’s an enigma that's been taken up by the art historian Corola Hicks in Girl in a Green Gown: the History and Mystery of the Arnolfini Portrait, sadly unfinished at the time of her death last year.

Beyond the fact that it’s a depiction of a merchant and his...his what, exactly? Is she his wife or his girlfriend? Is this a marriage or a betrothal? There is no certainty at all on the point, despite the misleading title. There is certainly a bond between the two, a couple who are, perhaps, already married, or who have simply announced a union to come. Is the lady in green pregnant, as so many have assumed from her bloated appearance? Would a pregnant paramour have been shown at such times in such a way? Why has the painter depicted himself in the mirror in the far wall? And why, as Hicks herself asks, does the man look like Vladimir Putin?

No, he's not Russian. He is, rather, a member of the powerful Arnolfini clan of Italian merchants, well-established in Bruges by the fifteenth century. Exactly who he is, though, and, even more intriguingly, who she is, the lady in green, has proved slightly more problematic, despite decades of speculation and art criticism. It may be one of two Giovanni Arnolfinis, though neither was married in 1434. So far as he is concerned it's certainly a fully-realised portrait of a particular individual (he was to appear again in the work of van Eyck), though she seems to be more of an ideal, a type reminiscent of the painter's Madonnas. Is she there at all, was she there for the sitting, or is she yet to come, not yet emerged from the shadows of the Platonic ideal, a future promise? Oh, and the celebration of fecundity may be no more than a celebration of cloth, another sign of the merchant’s wealth!

Hicks turns her thoughts to several themes, to the symbolism and the significance not just of the central act of union, but the surrounding paraphernalia - the dog - faithfulness? -, the mirror, the rug, the clothes, the glass in the windows, the furnishings, the single lighted candle and even the oranges by the window. Oranges, still a luxurious and expensive import, are another sign that Signor Arnolfini was a man of substance, a display of conspicuous consumption. They are also a reminder of Eve's gift to Adam, a fruit, interchangeable with apples, as the produce from the Tree of Knowledge. Even the bed is a sign of wealth, a sign that this was a man who could afford to put one in his front room! What we are looking at here is a celebrity couple, a kind of illustration from a fifteenth century version of Hello magazine, people who have made it and want others to know that they have made it, a bourgeois ideal!

The title of Hick's book is a clear nod in the direction of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Mona Lisa of the North, Johannes Vermeer's later masterpiece, another mystery about an unnamed woman, another intrigue, a wonderful vacuum filled by speculation and fiction. Likewise, we will never know any more than we do about the Girl in a Green Gown; we will never come a step closer to her and her individual destiny.

Hicks is good, but she is much better on the history than the mystery, which, paradoxically, I find quite pleasing. Some enigmas are best left as they are, to intrigue and perplex for all time. But the greater mystery is the artist himself, employed at the time of the Arnolfini Portrait as a painter in the court of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. Why, and by what manner, did he come to see the world in such a radical and realist fashion, in a fashion completely different from the conventions of late medieval art? We simply do not know.

Meanwhile one central question remains: why does Arnolfini look like Vladimir Putin?

Homage to Catalonia

The Tate Modern in London is running an exhibition at the moment dedicated to the work of Joan Miró, who along with Dali and Picasso is part of the triumvirate of genius produced by Spain in the previous century, shapers not just of their own unique art but the art of the world. But Miró had a unique identity of his own, Spanish, yes, but Catalan, the region to the north-east of the country which had such an influence on his paintings, through its landscape, its folklore and its traditions.

Of the three I far prefer Miró, not just because of the quality of his work, the joyfulness and exuberance, but because he was far less of a political artist than his contemporaries; far less of a communist than Picasso, far less of an eccentric than Dali. Under the title Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, the organisers of the exhibition have certainly attempt to give his work a certain political narrative, and those who want to follow this path can do no better than read the essay in the catalogue; otherwise just enjoy the joyfulness of the art.

There really is only one sure thing one can say about Miró – he was passionate about his passion for Catalonia. He may have been linked politically with communism and artistically with surrealism but he was clever enough to keep his distance from both, always following his own independent path.

And what a path it was. I must have stood in front of The Farm, a painting once owned by Ernest Hemingway, for ten minutes or more absorbing all of the wonderful detail. Painted while he was still in his twenties it marks the lifelong engagement of the painter with his land and his home. You will find it in the same room as other less familiar works, including The Rut, Mont-roig, The Church and the Village, House with a Palm Tree and Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), a wonderfully exciting combination of colours and images. One can also see the progression in his work, from the early realism to a more abstract combination of symbols and signs.

It seems to me that there is a unique and personal language in the work of Miró that defies the straightjacket of politics, something that makes him far more interesting than Dali or Picasso. In Dog Barking at the Moon, painted in 1926, the symbolism is as mysterious as it is beguiling. The series known as the Dream Pictures say nothing about external affairs and the outside world and everything about the artist's own personal consciousness.

There are paintings that make a political statement, the most obvious here being Still-Life with Old Shoe painted in 1937, a brilliantly glowing piece of work, and Untitled (Head of a Man), usually interpreted as statements about the Spanish Civil War, as well as the Constellations series painted in the 1940s. But these are the exceptions and, in contrast to Goya and Picasso, more obvious political painters, Miró is far more of a mystic and a visionary, far more poetic in the way that he sees the world.

There is a steady process of simplification, of breaking complexity right down to the most basic elements, simple lines and primary colours. The message is stark and easily deciphered. I look at Painting (1927) and what do I see, a random collection of lines and colours? No, I see desire, I see sensuality.

Over the thirteen rooms you will find more than one hundred and twenty works, not just painting but also lithographs and sculpture. With reference to the latter I particularly liked The Ladder of the Escaping Eye. The ladder, the motif of the whole exhibition, the ladder of escaping, is appropriate enough, though not perhaps in the way that the curators perceived. The escape is in the art itself, the gateway beyond history, the gateway to a parallel universe. It’s Miró’s triumph.

Look into the dark

In the course of any life there are remarkable discoveries to be made, sometimes quite by accident. I first became aware of the strange, enigmatic and atmospheric work of Godfried Schalcken, a Dutch genre painter of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, through a short story, a story that I will come to in a moment, though you may have already guessed the title and the author.

Schalcken painted in the precise and exquisitely detailed manner of the Leiden Fijnschilders, literally fine painters. His particular specialty was portraits or intimate scenes by night, the figures illuminated only by candle light. The first thing one notices is images captured by light, faces and figures; the second the dark beyond, impenetrable and slightly threatening.

His paintings are wonderfully atmospheric, but the enigma and strangeness is for me a way of seeing, a psychological frame, if you like, given by a reading of Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter (sic), a gothic horror story written by Sheridan Le Fanu. I came across this in an anthology when I was twelve, a time I was passing through my own peculiar gothic phase, and it gave me a quite delicious sense of terror! I still look into the darkness of Schalcken’s paintings with a slight sense of unease, even after all these years.


If you don’t know the story it tells of kinship betrayed by avarice, of love frustrated, of heartless bargains; it tells of an unnatural union between life and death. It was originally published in The Purcell Papers, purporting to be manuscripts of the late Rev. Francis Purcell, an Irish priest, who tells of a visit to a Dutch friend;

I had often been struck, while visiting Vandael, by a remarkable picture, in which, though no connoisseur myself, I could not fail to discern some very strong peculiarities, particularly in the distribution of light and shade, as also a certain oddity in the design itself, which interested my curiosity. It represented the interior of what might be a chamber in some antique religious building--the foreground was occupied by a female figure, arrayed in a species of white robe, part of which is arranged so as to form a veil. The dress, however, is not strictly that of any religious order. In its hand the figure bears a lamp, by whose light alone the form and face are illuminated; the features are marked by an arch smile, such as pretty women wear when engaged in successfully practising some roguish trick; in the background, and, excepting where the dim red light of an expiring fire serves to define the form, totally in the shade, stands the figure of a man equipped in the old fashion, with doublet and so forth, in an attitude of alarm, his hand being placed upon the hilt of his sword, which he appears to be in the act of drawing.

'There are some pictures,' said I to my friend, 'which impress one, I know not how, with a conviction that they represent not the mere ideal shapes and combinations which have floated through the imagination of the artist, but scenes, faces, and situations which have actually existed. When I look upon that picture, something assures me that I behold the representation of a reality.'

The Dutchman immediately confirms the impression and begins to unravel the tragic and terrible story of Rose Vanderklaust, the niece and ward of the painter Gerard Douw- another real Dutch master-, to whom Schalken was apprenticed. She was, by the light of the author’s imagination, to be the painter’s first and only love, given away, as it turns out, like a chattel as a matter of profit and loss to a mysterious rival, a certain Mynher Vanderhausen of Rotterdam. But Vanderhausen is not just mysterious; he is something else altogether. If you want to know exactly what, if you want to know what happens to Rose, do read the story for yourself. I certainly don’t want to spoil it for you!

Le Fanu’s prose is superlative. He uses words in the same precise way that the Dutch master uses paint, a style which excites the imagination, a technique which adds to the atmosphere and the general mood of tension. Above all he has the most intimate understanding of the work of the real Schalcken, which has enabled him to weave a life into a macabre legend in a masterly and seamless fashion.

I should say, just in case you set off in pursuit, that the painting referred to in the story does not actually exist; it merely represents a kind of amalgam of Schlacken’s work. However, given the references in the story I am convinced that the central model Le Fanu had in mind, Rose with her arch smile, is that of Girl with a Candle, with the dark threatening to envelop a guarded and uncertain light.

A Life less Ordinary

I mentioned in a previous blog (Dangerous and Brilliant) that the infamous and notorious Michelangelo Caravaggio is one of my all-time favourite painters. It’s not just the art that excites and intrigues me - it’s the life, or, to be more exact, it’s the death! He was only thirty-eight when he shuffled off his mortal coil in July 1610, though the precise circumstances of his particular exit have remained a mystery ever since.

Now, on the basis of some analysis of dry bones, Italian scientists are claiming that he may have died from lead poisoning from the paints he used, a somewhat speculative conclusion since they have since admitted that the bones tested may not be his at all!

So, the mystery remains, probably never to be solved. But as nature abhors a vacuum so, too, does history or, rather, historians, which really amounts to the same thing. To coincide with the anniversary Andrew Graham-Dixon has written Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, in which he reveals all sorts of salacious facts, which I take to mean that the art was sacred and the life profane!

Profane it most assuredly was. Graham-Dixon suggests that he was sexually adventurous – there is no great secret in that -, that he worked as a pimp, that he fathered an illegitimate child, and that his murder of Ranuccio Tomassoni, a notorious Roman pimp, in 1606 was the result of a dispute over the honour of Lavinia, Tomassoni’s wife.

After this Caravaggio fled to Malta to take refuge among the knights; but unfortunately for him his unstable temperament followed on. In July 1608 he was jailed for assaulting Fra Giovanni Rodmonte Roero, one of the Order’s most senior knights. He escaped closely pursued, according to Graham-Dixon, by the vengeful Roero, who caught up with him in Naples in 1609, attacking him outside a tavern and severely disfiguring his face. The tavern in question, the Osteria del Cerriglio, was a haunt of homosexuals, which has allowed the author to add a new speculative gloss to the artist’s mystique!

We know for a certainty that Caravaggio died in the Tuscan town of Porto Ecole the year after this attack. It’s Graham-Dixon’s contention that, weakened by his injuries, he probably died of a heart attack or exhaustion following a hundred-mile ride from Palo to Porto Ecole, where he was supposed to catch a boat carrying three of his paintings. The author says;

The latest lead poisoning theory just does not fit the facts. Caravaggio did not slowly deteriorate before his death as he would have done with lead poisoning, but was immensely physically fit, escaping from prison, running across Sicily and painting huge paintings right up until just before his death. I hope I have proven that his behaviour was not that of an irrational mad man, as been suggested, but of a violent man living in violent times whose tragic story is certainly the most extraordinary of any artist to have lived.

Of that I have not the least doubt.

This is not a pipe – the art of Rene Magritte

All art should inspire thought though it seems to me that surrealism goes that step further: surrealism is about thinking. In particular I love the way in which surrealist painters take commonplace objects and reinterpret them in an unusual, sometimes in an unsettling and vaguely sinister way.

I have in mind the paintings of the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, my favourite from the school, who takes the most banal subjects, reproducing them in an almost deadpan way, and then adds a penetrating visual joke. One of my favourites is his Ceci n'est pas une pipe- This is not a pipe- which happens to be a straightforward depiction of, well, a pipe! In one version, just to emphasise the point, he has smoke curling up and on to the picture’s frame.

He is quite right, of course - it’s not a pipe; it’s a painting! Next time, even when you are looking at the most conventional art, do remember that what you are seeing is not a thing but a vision, a single interpretation of a thing.

The Dream and Lie of Picasso

There is one certain truth about Pablo Picasso: he was first, second and last an egoist. But he was a great man of principle, the objection comes, a communist, a lover of freedom, a hater of fascism. After all, this was a man who depicted the horrors of Nationalist Spain in such works as The Dream and Lie of Franco. Alas, it has now come to light that he was actively involved in negotiations with representatives of that same regime in the 1950s with a view to having a retrospective exhibition of his work mounted in Madrid!

If such an exhibition had been held it would have been a major coup for the Falangists, destroying Picasso’s sainted reputation among the left. The Spanish foreign ministry agreed that the talks should go ahead, but on the grounds of absolute secrecy. When details were leaked to the press the whole project was simply abandoned, while official denials were released. But they were sufficiently far advanced for members of Picasso’s circle to write pleading that he should resist the temptation, according to a note left by Jean Cocteau in his diary.

These details are set to be released by John Richardson and Gijs van Hensbergen, working on the fourth volume of Picasso’s biography. Seemingly his views on politics, like so many other things, were a lot more subtle that usually assumed. He apparently told Cocteau of the communists that “I have joined a family, and like all families, it’s full of shit.”

The fact is that his love of Spain, his desire for an exhibition there, was greater than his love of the Communist Party. But greatest of all was his love for himself. Less full of shit, I feel sure, than communism.

Dangerous and Brilliant

If there was ever an artist to whom the words mad, bad and dangerous to know apply it really has to be Michelangelo da Caravaggio, known simply as Caravaggio, a great painter and an altogether infamous human being! He was a hard-fringing, hard-living, hard-fighting man, whose actions did not stop short of murder.

His reputation as an artist opened doors, just as his actions as a man quickly closed them again. At one point he was even enrolled among the Knights of Saint John on Malta, only to be expelled in December 1608 as a “foul and rotten member.” Even the precise circumstances of his death in 1610 are still shrouded in mystery. Supposedly dead of a fever, no body was ever found and no grave exists.

But as an artist he is one of Italy’s greatest, and a personal favourite of mine. In some ways he was a political artist, a propagandist for the Counter-Reformation, not just in the devotional subjects he chose but the style, the new life he breathed into religious painting that had been dominated for so long by the dead hand of Mannerism. In technique he was a naturalist, who made the most inventive use chiaroscuro, the sharp contrasts of light and dark, giving a heightened sense of drama, vivid, wonderful and intense. I see in Caravaggio the beginnings not just of Baroque but a great many subsequent trends in art. This is painting at its most passionate, no matter if the subject is sacred or profane.

Henry Moore-the Death of Imagination

I don’t know much about art but I know what I like, so the cliché goes. My version goes like this: I know quite a lot about art and I know what I hate. And what I have particular hatred for is the fraudulent, the talentless and the bogus. I hate those who are accepted as good and lasting simply because the art establishment says they will be good and lasting. It is the classic tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Only those with no taste could fail to see the merit in, say, Damien Hirst; only those with no taste could fail to see the merit in the sculptures of Henry Moore. I loathe the sculptures of Henry Moore, those ghastly blobs that inhabit city centres across the world. There; the child has spoken!

I make this confession against the background of a major exhibition of Moore’s work in the Tate, running until the beginning of August. I went, I saw, I left. Not that I expected to be convinced that the time had come to look again at an artist whose work is rather falling out of fashion. No, I suppose it was just to confirm a prejudice, not against contemporary sculpture, just against Henry Moore. There they are all lined up, those graceless shapes, not ugly, just pointless, a confirmation of how little talent the man truly had.

Please do not assume this arises from an animus against forms of art which do not adhere to traditional classical forms. No, there is a lot that I admire in artists who break conventional boundaries. I admire the work of Barbara Hepworth and I adore the Futurists, having a particular love of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

Then there is Moore; shapes struggling for life and never quite getting there; lumpy and leaden and almost completely devoid of imagination, of truly creative intellect. There is no animation, there is no focus; there is just the same thing, time after time. No matter the subject it gets the same treatment to the point it becomes meaningful to say that if you have seen one sculpture by Moore you have seen them all; reclining figure, king and queen, mother and child, no matter; you’ve seen them all. It’s a bit like a pianist who was never able to progress much beyond chopsticks.

There is nothing in Moore that challenges, nothing that demands a second look. The curators describe his work as “abject, erotic, violated and visceral”, which seems to me to be just a succession of rather meaningless words. One review I read asked how they could possibly tell. My comment is simpler; if they think this stuff is ‘erotic’ they really need to get out more. But Moore became the fashion of the age, a comment less about art and more about the age, more about the death of imagination.

The Butterfly Queen

The National Gallery is presently holding an exhibition of the work of Paul Delaroche, a nineteenth century French painter much given to depicting subjects from English history. His work includes such paintings as Strafford Lead to Execution, showing Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, one of the principal advisors to Charles I, being blessed by Archbishop Laud, himself imprisoned, while on his way to the block, The Princes in the Tower and the recently rediscovered Charles I Insulted by Cromwell’s Soldiers, which for me conjures up aspects of medieval depictions of the passion of Jesus.


However, the centrepiece of the show surely has to be the enduringly popular The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1834 it was an immediate sensation amongst a French audience, at least some of whom would have remembered the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette. It depicts the last moments, the last fraught moments, before Jane’s execution for treason in 1554. Jane, who ruled England as butterfly rules a day, was beheaded on the orders of the Catholic Queen Mary.

It’s a wonderful painting, one of my personal favourites on an event in history. There she is, the blindfolded teenager, like a martyr in white, all of the light focused on her, groping for the block. In the background her attendants collapse in grief, while to the right the executioner waits with his axe. It’s grand, intense, full of melodrama and pathos. Do go and see it if you can, and remember the Butterfly Queen.

Night, Terror and Death

Max Beckmann was a German painter often associated with Expressionism, who later became a leading influence on the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the 1920s. The one painting of his that moves and disturbs me most is The Night, painted just after the First World War, during which the artist, who was a medical orderly, had a nervous breakdown in the face of the suffering he witnessed.

The Night is one of his most recognised works, a brilliant but bleak painting, depicting a world of arbitrary violence, violence without redemption or purpose. It is a violence that comes from everywhere and nowhere, and was to be a prophetic image of Germany-and Europe's future. The pictorial vision derives ultimately from Matthias Grünewald and the German Middle Ages.