Richard Dadd: Fairies, Sprites, Nymphs and Goblins

Richard Dadd - The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke 1855–64

I recently enjoyed a small exhibition of the art of Richard Dadd. (‘Beyond Bedlam’ is at the Royal Academy, London until 25 October.)
 
‘Perhaps the artist is himself the greatest victim of delusion – self delusion.’
Richard Dadd
 
Born in Chatham, Kent in 1817, the son of a chemist, Dadd studied at the Royal Academy Schools, where he was a member of a progressive group known as the Clique. Developing an interest in folklore and the uncanny, he was particularly inspired by Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ 
 
Queen Titania sleeps in a grotto, attended by dancing sylphs. Mischievous sprite Puck, a demonic mega-baby, sits cross-legged on a mushroom in a forest glade. A crouching fairy adorns her hair with flowers and regards us with a slight smile.

Dadd’s work is enigmatic and sensitive, exquisitely detailed and vibrantly coloured.

Richard Dadd - Puck 1841

In 1842 Dadd travelled to Turkey, Syria and Egypt. He filled his sketchbooks with intricate studies of camels, ruined monuments, mosques and markets. However, he began to experience delusions, became violent, and believed himself to be under the influence of the god Osiris. His condition was initially thought to be sunstroke. But in truth, his family had a history of mental illness, and he was probably suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. It has also been suggested that he’d consumed too much opium.
 
Back in England, Dadd withdrew to recuperate in the village of Cobham. On 28 August 1843, he took his father for an after-dinner walk and murdered him with a knife, believing him to be a devil. Fleeing to France, he tried to kill a stranger, and was subsequently apprehended and taken back to England.
 
Dadd was committed to Bethlem Hospital in Southwark (commonly known as Bedlam), an institution with a relatively enlightened regime. Encouraged by staff to continue painting, he created detailed works based on the sketches from his travels; portraits, literary scenes and landscapes. He also produced a series of watercolours to illustrate the intense, dark passions that drive human behaviour - including Grief, Ambition and Self-Contempt; Deceit, Jealousy and Agony-Raving Madness.

Henry Hering - Portrait of Richard Dadd, c. 1857
Photographic print. 20 x 15.5 cm. Courtesy of Bethlem Museum of the Mind. Alex Fox (Roy Fox Fine Art Photography)

Naturally Dadd returned to the enchanted worlds that had established his reputation. His most celebrated picture is ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.’ Painted over a nine-year period, it was inspired by Mercutio’s description in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ of Mab, the fairy queen who plants dreams in human heads at night.
 
‘Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut 
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, 
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers. 
And in this state she gallops night by night 
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.’
William Shakespeare, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Act I, scene 4
 
We peer through an undergrowth of wildflowers and weeds, to discover an axeman - intent on constructing Mab’s new fairy carriage - on the point of cleaving a chestnut in two. A bearded patriarchal figure wearing a gold papal crown stands nearby, and a crowd of peasants, soldiers and sprites look on. There, in the background, are Oberon and Titania, and a trumpet-playing crane fly. The image is intricate, ethereal, unsettling. Is the apothecary at the top right perhaps a reference to the artist’s murdered father? Is the adjacent child with an outstretched arm Dadd himself? Is that blood pouring from his fingers?

Richard Dadd - Contradiction. Oberon and Titania, 1854-58
Oil on canvas. 61 x 75.5 cm. Private Collection. Photo: David Parmiter

After 20 years in Bethlem, Dadd was moved to Broadmoor Hospital, near Reading, a newly built high-security facility. A few months after his arrival, his Case Notes observed:
 
‘Employs himself generally in painting and is at present engaged on a water colour fairy scene which he is executing with great care.’
 
Dadd remained in Broadmoor for the rest of his life, painting constantly. On one occasion, he seemed to reflect to a visitor on his artistic reputation.
 
‘Yes, some painters - the few, perhaps - achieve renown and substantial rewards; others lag behind.’
 
Dadd died of tuberculosis in 1886. He was largely forgotten until the 1960s, when his fantastical world of nymphs and goblins chimed with the culture of hippy psychedelia. On seeing Dadd’s work in the Tate Gallery, Freddie Mercury was inspired to write the 1974 Queen song ‘The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke.’ 
 
Some have argued that Dadd’s fascination with sylphs and sprites derived from his mental illness. But the artist’s enthusiasm pre-dates his breakdown. I confess I’ve never been much taken with the mystical and occult. But his paintings prompted me to reflect on arcane traditions; the realm of dreams and fantasy; the surreal, subconscious and supernatural. Sometimes it’s healthy to set aside rationality, and let oneself go.
 
In a rhymed account of the ‘Fairy Feller’s’ origins and characters, Dadd explained that his picture was inspired by poetry, chance, and a kind of magic. 
 
‘The fairies grow without / The reach of human ken or will.’
 
 
'He's a fairy feller.
The fairy folk have gathered 'round the new moon shine,
To see the feller crack a nut at night's noon time.
To swing his axe he swears, as he climbs he dares,
To deliver
The master stroke.’
Queen, 'The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke’ (F Mercury)

No. 585

Michaelina Wautier: ‘She Designed It and She Made It’

Michaelina Wautier - Self Portrait

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of the work of seventeenth century painter Michaelina Wautier (The Royal Academy, London until 21 June). Poorly documented, and, for nearly three centuries, largely forgotten, her achievements are finally being recognised.
 
Wautier was born around 1614 in the city of Mons in the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium). With no access to training, it was very difficult at that time for women to become artists. Wautier at least had an older brother, Charles, who was a painter, and the fact that she never married afforded her a certain amount of freedom. She and Charles lived and worked together in Brussels, near the royal court.
 
Employing a restricted colour palette, a mark of artistic confidence, Wautier painted penetrating portraits of local noblemen and Spanish officers. With dramatically lit faces, the sitters sometimes turn towards the viewer, lending the images immediacy and informality. She displayed a particular sensitivity in her depiction of children. A well-dressed youth sits intently blowing soap bubbles – a reflection on life’s fragility.

Michaelina Wautier - Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1656–59. Oil on canvas. 69 x 60.5 cm

Women artists were the first to paint themselves at work. (Men worried that the tools of their trade suggested a lowly technician status.) Wautier presents herself wearing pearls, a white silk dress and a black velvet mantle, sitting at an easel, brushes and palette in hand. The paint colours she has on the palette are the ones she uses in the portrait itself. The unpainted canvas on the easel is simply the woven surface left bare. She looks directly out at us.
 
Wautier’s ready wit is evident in the recently rediscovered series of the Five Senses. A young boy holds a pair of glasses to his eyes, staring intently at his palm. Another plays the recorder. A third scratches his head while looking down at his cut left index finger. A fourth takes a tentative bite on a piece of bread. And, finally, a lad in a felt hat holds his nose, recoiling from the stench of a rotten egg. 

Michaelina Wautier - Smell

Whereas the convention at the time was for women artists to restrict themselves to portraiture and flower painting, Wautier ventured into mythological and biblical themes: a youthful Mary learns to read in the company of her parents; the angel Gabriel informs Mary of her destiny; Saint Catherine sits at the foot of the Madonna and Child. 

Michaelina Wautier - The Education of the Virgin

Perhaps mindful that religious art was thought to require masculine originality and intellect, Wautier signed two of her canvases with her name and the words ‘invenit et fecit’: 
‘Michaelina Wautier designed and made this.’ 
 
In making her assured claim to imagination and craft, Wautier presented us with an elegant summary of the core creative skills. But she had another talent, one equally vital to success. She was determined.

Michaelina Wautier - Triumph of Bacchus

The monumental ‘Triumph of Bacchus’ shows a group of revellers accompanying the god of wine, as he, somewhat the worse for wear, relaxes in a wheelbarrow. For centuries, Wautier’s authorship went unrecognised, and the picture was described by one critic as too bold to have been painted by a female. However, on the right of the procession, a woman has stopped to gaze out at the viewer. Wearing a long pink robe and carrying a staff, she bares a breast, and sports a confident, composed air. It is Wautier. It was the only signature she needed.
 
 
'So I like what I see when I'm looking at me,
When I'm walking past the mirror.
Don't stress through the night, at a time in my life,
Ain't worried about if you feel it.
Got my head on straight, I got my vibe right,
I ain't gonna let you kill it.
You see I wouldn't change my life, my life's just…
Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.’
Mary J Blige, ‘Just Fine' (M J Blige / C Stewart / T Nash / P Alexander)

No. 567

Lucian Freud: Getting as Near to It as I Can

Lucian Freud - Girl in Bed. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London. Lent by a private collection

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of the art of Lucian Freud, which focused particularly on his drawings. (The National Portrait Gallery, London until 4 May) 

Freud is renowned for his raw and intensely observed portraits and nude studies. This show, including works in pencil, pen and ink, charcoal and etching - as well as some key paintings - shines a light on the artist’s practices, processes and techniques.

‘I have always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It’s people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.’
Lucian Freud

Early in his career, Freud often depicted animals, living and dead - a skinned hen, an oil-bound puffin, a stuffed zebra’s head. Critics, prompted by his curious compositions and juxtapositions, suggested that he was a surrealist. But he rejected the notion.

‘What is more surreal than a nose between two eyes?’

When Freud subsequently turned to human portraiture, he painted people as animals, regarding them with the same clinical, ‘pitiless’ eye.

‘I am inclined to think of (humans)…if they’re dressed, as animals dressed up.’

Lucian Freud - Portrait of a Young Man, 1944 (black crayon & white chalk on paper) © The Lucian Freud Archive.
All Rights Reserved 2025 / Bridgeman Images. Private Collection.

In the creation of his early portraits, Freud located himself right up close to his subjects. Rigorous and disciplined, he scrutinised them like a hawk. His first wife Kitty Garman said that sitting for him was ‘like being arranged.’ 

‘One of the most exciting things is seeing through the skin, to the blood and veins and markings.’

Lucian Freud - The Painter's Mother. Oil on Canvas 1982 - 1984

Sometimes Freud’s intense examination, his unsparing vision, led to what he called ‘involuntary magnification’ of his sitters’ features. And many were rendered with wide, watchful, haunted eyes.

‘I was trying for accuracy of a sort. I didn’t think of it as detail. It was simply, through my concentration, a question of focus.’

Freud sought to treat heads and bodies with equal attention. In some notes he remarked:

‘Turn heads into naked people
bodies, body’s whole complete
living naked women
avoid facial expression
make bodies expressive of feeling’

At the exhibition you can see some of Freud’s meticulous portraits of wives, family, friends and lovers; of fellow-artists, aristocrats and celebrities. Painted in natural light during the daytime, and in artificial light at night, these brutally honest pictures record blemishes, bruises, wrinkles and flab. They are distillations of raw physical presence.

Freud was equally unsparing in his self-portraits.

‘You’ve got to try and paint yourself as another person.’

Freud’s images convey both tenderness and discomfort; strength and vulnerability. They can be at the same time clinical and sensual. Perhaps most touching are his portraits of his mother, Lucie Freud – sensitive studies of fragility, depression and grief.

‘I started painting her because she’d lost interest in everything, including me.’

Freud sometimes took paintings from history as his subject. I was taken with his response when asked why he had chosen to study Chardin’s ‘The Young Schoolmistress’:

‘I don’t want to copy the Chardin. I simply want to get as near to it as I can. It’s a labour of love.’

Lucian Freud - David Hockney, 2002 (oil on canvas) © The Lucian Freud Archive. Private Collection.

Freud painted the world as he found it, without flattery. He teaches us to get as near as we can to our subjects; to look and look again; to scrutinise and examine; to strip away meaning and assumption; to see what is truly in front of us.

‘Nothing ever stands in for anything. Nobody is representing anything. Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s a chair.’

'Look at me, look at you.
Look at you look at me.
See my eyes, see your eyes.
Watching me watching you.
And reaching,
And reaching,
And reaching right into your mind.’
Marlena Shaw, 'Look at Me, Look at You’ (W E Tragesser)

No. 562

Rose Wylie: ‘Anything That Is Out of Control, I Like’

Rose Wylie - Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win), 2015
Photograph courtesy Jari Lager: Soon-Hak Kwon © Rose Wylie)

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of the work of Rose Wylie - the first British female artist to occupy all of the Royal Academy’s main galleries. (‘The Picture Comes First’ is at the Royal Academy, London until 19 April.)

‘I love chance. It breaks through notions of control, of knowing what you were going to do before you do it.’
Rose Wylie

Born in Hythe in 1934, Wylie studied painting at Folkestone and Dover School of Art in the 1950s. Having taken an extended career break to raise three children, from the 1980s she devoted herself to her art, basing herself in a studio in her Kent cottage. She still works there today.

‘In painting I don’t like too much pernickety, precious fiddling about. Perhaps you’ve noticed.’

Wylie’s big canvases are painted in bold, bright colours, thickly applied, in a loose, spontaneous style. They integrate distant memories and recent experiences; animals, flora and fauna; references from history and mythology, from cinema, celebrity and popular culture. 

‘It’s better to just get on… Just get on and do what you’re going to do. Thinking too much can wreck or inhibit ‘spontaneous.’’

Rose Wylie - Yellow Strip

Here are birds, ducks and ack-ack fire. German planes fly overhead while dogs cavort in Kensington Gardens. (Wylie experienced the Blitz as a young girl.) Here are attentive cats, a big red elephant, an irreverent anatomical diagram of a horse. We see Premiership footballers and Olympic swimmers; Choco Leibniz, a well-cooked omelette and red lips licking a coffee spoon. Some friends take dinner outside on a summer evening. There’s a seating plan. And here’s Penelope Cruz on a bench, and Rita Tushingham with an axe.

Wylie is interested in the visual impact of images rather than the story they tell. Revelling in incongruous juxtapositions, her pictures are quirky, playful, joyful.

‘Usually I paint something I’ve seen, but I may fiddle with the scale, context and rules of gravity. I draw from observation, memory and with ‘conceptual projection.’’

Wylie clearly has a fondness for fashion. She paints her ‘50s-era bullet-bra, her favourite red lipstick and checked skirt, her dress with the padded shoulders. She paints cut-out paper dolls. 

‘I like stuff that goes across time, through trans-temporality, or whatever you want to call it.’

Sometimes she adds text. Underneath a reclining female figure, she writes: ‘Bathing costume green. Glamour personified.’ Accompanying an ice skater in a pale pink dress: ‘Will I win.’ Alongside Snow White holding a duster: ‘Some day her prince will come.’

Rose Wylie - Study from Red Twink

Wylie draws every day in sketchbooks, on large sheets and scraps of paper. She has an insatiable curiosity, an avid interest in her immediate surroundings and in the world beyond. Her drawings form a memory bank, a treasure trove of ideas to which she constantly returns for inspiration. Her studio floor, covered with layers of newspapers, also acts as a source of stimulus.

‘Chance can bring in something totally new and unexpected…a cure for boredom… Chance is like the break in the dotted line. Anything that is out of control, I like.’

Wylie reminds us that, though we are endlessly trying to impose order, structure and logic on our thoughts, our mental processes are often erratic; coincidence causes fresh associations; and memories tend to be messy - jumbled, fluid, confusing.

‘It is the things I remember that I’m interested in. The memory may not be accurate, but if I have a fond memory of something, the work I make gives me a chance to relate the work to the memory.’

Rose Wylie - Snowwhite (3), with Duster

Wylie teaches creative people to liberate the imagination from classification and control; to be constantly curious, open to stimulus from all sorts of sources; to draw on recollections and experiences; to embrace the random, spontaneous and the incongruous; to make free associations. And, critically, to regard age as an advantage, not an adversary.

‘Age has more appeal [than youth]…There’s more ‘longer backwards’ to work with – and coincidences and connections have more time to happen.’

'Confusion in her eyes that says it all,
She's lost control.
And she's clinging to the nearest passerby,
She's lost control.
And she gave away the secrets of her past,
And said, "I've lost control again."
And of a voice that told her when and where to act.
She said, "I've lost control again.”'

Joy Division, ‘She’s Lost Control’ (B Sumner/ P Hook/ S Morris/ I Curtis)

No. 561

The Unwelcome Feedback: Do You Want an Opinion or Affirmation?

Carl Wilhelm Anton Seiler (1846–1921) - Cigars After Dinner (1901)

We’d been dining at a smart Islington restaurant. Perhaps a little too smart for my taste – somewhat formal, with reverential food presentation and only hushed conversation.

It was the end of the evening, and the chef-proprietor was circling the tables, exchanging a few pleasantries. Eventually he arrived before us, with a fixed smile and a satisfied demeanour.

‘Good evening, Monsieur, Madame. How did you find your meal?’

My wife was very happy to offer her point of view.

‘Well, the service was excellent and we enjoyed our dinner for the most part. Thank you. But I have to say, our vegetables were overcooked.’

Taken aback, the chef-proprietor adopted a rather hurt expression. He was not expecting this kind of response. My wife added:

‘And I think your kitchen is using too much salt.’

We may all recognise this uncomfortable exchange. Not just from restaurants. But from broader work and social settings. Feedback, though often invited, is not always welcome.

Sometimes people asking for an opinion, are really just seeking affirmation. 

I confess that, when I was younger, I regarded criticism as a personal affront. I was defensive, sensitive, easily hurt. But I gradually discovered, from observation of colleagues and the worlds of sport and culture, that ‘feedback is a gift.’ We can only improve our own performance if we embrace other people’s perspectives.

And, of course, feedback is just as hard to give as to receive.

I was taught to deliver constructive criticism by cushioning it between two positive statements. The ‘feedback sandwich,’ as it was inelegantly termed, involved praising a behaviour, raising an area for focus, and then reinforcing the key message with encouragement. Inevitably these sandwiches could still be hard to digest.

Next time you’re about to invite feedback, pause for a moment. Do I genuinely want to hear a perspective on my work? Am I prepared to reflect on what I hear, and if necessary act on it? Or am I really just looking for endorsement?

And if you’re volunteering an opinion on someone else’s contribution, remember: ‘tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

We left the restaurant soon after our awkward encounter with the chef-proprietor. Never to return. To be fair, I doubt if he moderated his salt policy either. 

'Say it ain't so, Joe. 
Please say it ain't so.
That's not what I wanna hear, Joe, and I've got the right to know.
Say it ain't so, Joe.
Please say it ain't so.
I'm sure they're telling us lies ,Joe,
Please tell us it ain't so.
They told us that our hero has played his trump card.
He doesn't know how to go on.
We're clinging to his charm and determined smile,
But the good old days are gone.
Say it ain't so, Joe.
Please say it ain't so.’
Murray Head, 'Say It Ain't So, Joe'

No. 560

The Sisterhood of Mickalene Thomas: Create the Right Context, Then Focus and Celebrate

Mama Bush (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher

I recently enjoyed an exhibition of work by the African American artist Mickalene Thomas. (‘All About Love’ is at the Hayward Gallery, London until 5 May.)

‘With painting you can manipulate time, shaping how it’s perceived. It’s about exploring fantasy, illusion and the creation of desire.’
Mickalene Thomas

Thomas creates paintings, photographs, collages and installations that celebrate her family, friends and lovers. Her portraits are big, bold, colourful and confident. Conveying a very human presence with intimacy and intensity, they stop us in our tracks, hold us in their gaze.

‘To see yourself, and for others to see you, is a form of validation. I’m interested in that very mysterious and mystical way we relate to each other in the world.’

Born in 1971, in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas was raised by her mother, a former fashion model, who enrolled her in after-school art lessons at the Newark Museum. 

‘It all began as a young child, when I recognised beauty and desire by the way the world responded to my mother’s beauty. My understanding of the complexity of desire began with how I perceived myself in relation to my mother. I became mindful of a desire to be the woman that she hoped I would be.’

As a teenager, Thomas moved to Portland, Oregon, and she subsequently studied at the Pratt Institute and Yale School of Art. She developed a particular interest in creating large-scale depictions of Black women. 

‘I grew up with a lot of brothers, and I don’t have any sisters, so for me it’s really important to develop my sisterhood. It’s something I’ve always coveted.’

Painting in oil, acrylic and enamel, sometimes employing collaged black and white photos to add a touch of realism, Thomas inlays her work with multi-coloured rhinestones. Her subjects, dressed in vibrant, glamorous clothes and located in bright domestic contexts, are in repose, relaxed, at leisure. They regard us directly, with assured stares, seeming both self-possessed and vulnerable.

‘The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go.’

Often the poses and compositions echo the works of historical European painters - Ingres, Courbet, Manet, Monet – as Thomas seeks to reclaim art from its traditional white male perspective.

‘My work is rooted in self-discovery, celebration, joy, sensuality, and a need to see positive images of Black women in the world.’

Mickalene Thomas, Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015,
Rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel, 60 x 96 in (152.4 x 243.8 cm)

I was impressed by Thomas’ process. 

She first photographs her subjects in bespoke sets built in her Brooklyn studio. These interiors, draped with vividly patterned textiles, suggest warmth, security, the comfort of home. 

‘I created domestic settings primarily for fellow Black women – my muses – to spend time and have new experiences in familiar surroundings, perhaps resembling their mother’s or grandmother’s living rooms.’

At the exhibition you can see a couple of Thomas’ living room installations, recalled from her own childhood: mirror walls, thick carpet, Tiffany lamp and pot plants; Donna Summer and Diana Ross LPs leaning against the music centre. She seems to be suggesting that our identity is shaped by the spaces we inhabit, the clothes we wear, the music we listen to.

Having put her sitters at their ease, Thomas then finds deeply personal connections with them. She focuses on who they truly are, celebrates them, elevates them. 

‘Beauty has always been an element of discussion for Black women, whether or not we’re the ones having the conversation.’

In the world of commercial communication, we may recognise this approach: settle on the right environment; create an appropriate context; locate the brand in its own world. Then focus on, and amplify, its truth.

‘I define my work as a feminist act and a political act because I’m Black and a woman. You don’t necessarily have to claim that, but the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you’re a woman.’

There’s much to see at the exhibition beyond Thomas’ portraiture. I was particularly taken with a video piece inspired by Eartha Kitt’s 1953 song, ‘Angelitos Negros.’ The artist reimagines original footage of Kitt singing, combining it with images of herself. The lyrics ask why religious painters of the past filled the heavens exclusively with white figures. 

It’s an absence Thomas seeks to address. She paints her own Black angels. 

'Painters painting saints in church,
How do you know that God is white?
Painter, if you paint with love,
Paint me some Black angels now.
For good Blacks in Heaven,
Painter, show us that you care.
Paint me some Black angels now.
Paint me some Black angels now.’

Eartha Kitt, 'Angelitos Negros’ (Translation) (M Maciste, A Blanco)

No. 507

Now You See Us: Buried Treasure and Hidden Gems

Mary Grace - Self portrait 1760’s . Oil on canvas

'Now You See Us’ at the Tate Britain, London (until 13 October) celebrates over 100 women artists who worked in Britain between 1520 and 1920. The exhibition presents paintings, pastels, needlework, photography and sculpture, that for the most part have been little known and rarely seen.

Here you’ll find Mary Beale’s glamorous depictions of 18th century society ladies, and a rather tender sketch that she made of her young son, his curly tresses tumbling to his shoulders. And there’s Mary Grace, whose only surviving painting is a self-portrait. In a fine primrose silk dress, she sits bolt upright, a palette resting on one arm, and regards us with stern authority.

Through the Looking-Glass, by Louise Jopling, 1875, acquired by the Tate. Photograph: Tate

In the 19th century rooms, Rosa Bonheur takes us to the Highlands, to mournful sheep grazing under a stormy sky. Elizabeth Forbes presents a naturalistic image of a farm labourer, head turned to the floor, in quiet conversation with a young woman at the edge of the woods - terribly romantic. And with its bold brushstrokes and flat appearance, Louise Jopling’s self-portrait suggests a Mancunian Manet.

There’s a good deal of buried treasure here, and many hidden gems.

Elizabeth Forbes - The Edge of the Woods

As we progress through the galleries, we also learn of the many hurdles women artists had to overcome.

For the most part, they were subject, first to their fathers, and then their husbands, limited to the domestic sphere. Having no access to apprenticeships, art was a private, amateur pursuit, one that was only available to the higher social orders, or those related to male artists. Their lives and work were poorly documented.

In 1768 Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser became founding members of the Royal Academy (along with 32 men). However, when Johann Zoffany memorialised the new institution with a group picture of the Academicians at a life class, Kauffman and Moser were reduced to two indistinct portraits on the back wall - women were barred from life classes on the grounds of propriety. It would take more than 150 years for the next woman to be elected to membership.

Johan Zoffany - The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771-1772

There was a commonly held view that women were best suited to ‘imitation’ rather than invention. Miniatures, pastels and watercolours, sectors in which women thrived, were treated dismissively as ‘lower arts’ by the establishment. In 1770, the Royal Academy banned from its exhibitions ‘needle-work, artificial flowers, cut paper, shell-work, or any such baubles’. Joshua Reynolds, the Academy’s President, remarked that working in pastel was ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement.’

Nevertheless, they persisted. Between 1760 and 1830 some 900 women exhibited at public shows.

Flower painting was considered an appropriate artform for women. Mary Gartside created sublime floral watercolours, whilst at the same time pioneering colour theory. Mary Delany’s collages of spider lilies and flowering raspberry - made with coloured paper placed on black backgrounds (what she called her ‘paper mosaicks’) - are exquisite.

Mary Delany Rubus Odoratus 1772-1782 The British Museum

Gradually in the Victorian era women artists found new galleries, exhibition spaces and events that were less conservative than the Royal Academy. At the same time, they campaigned for access to training, governance and awards. Florence Claxton’s ‘Woman’s Work’ of 1861 shows some women fawning at the feet of a pompous man who sits under a false idol. Other women meanwhile are confined behind ‘the ancient wall of Custom and Prejudice,’ and the door to the medical profession is locked. Only one female artist, Rosa Bonheur, has climbed a ladder to view the ‘forbidden fruit’ beyond.

Florence Claxton, Women's Work, 1861

Founded in 1871, the Slade School of Fine Art in London offered women an education on equal terms with men, and, at last, access to life classes. Soon women students outnumbered men by three to one.

As we enter the 20th century rooms, and the progress towards broader freedoms, we see work from artists who have become more familiar to us: Gwen John, Laura Knight, Vanessa Bell, Nina Hamnet, Helen Saunders. Still, some of these magnificent painters have taken a century to receive proper recognition.

Leaving the exhibition, one can’t help thinking about wasted talent. So many remarkable artists unseen and unacknowledged. So many great works neglected and ignored.We may also be prompted to reflect on the world of work. Are our biases blinding us to untapped abilities and underutilised expertise? Are we failing to realise the true potential of the human capital at our disposal? Are we still missing out on buried treasure and hidden gems?

'I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.'
Maya Angelou

'The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know.
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow,
Years may go by.
So hold on to your special friend.
Here, you'll need something to keep her in:
"Now you stay inside this foolish grin"
Though any day your secrets end.
Then again,
Years may go by.’

Rickie Lee Jones, 'On Saturday Afternoons In 1963’

No. 475

‘Will It Paint?’: John Singer Sargent and the Semiotics of Style

John Singer Sargent - Lord Ribblesdale

I recently visited an exhibition considering the importance of clothes and costume in the portraits of John Singer Sargent. (‘Sargent and Fashion’ is at the Tate Britain, London until 7 July.)

The show is a celebration of sensuous silks and satins; of long buttoned bodices and pleated organza skirts; of Chesterfield coats, velvet jackets and crimson dressing gowns. Sargent captures the play of light and shadow across garments, their undulating creases and folds. He revels in the detail of a black tulle dress, a scarlet cape and a mauve sash; the elegance of a Chantilly fan, an antique lace collar and a Kashmiri shawl.

The exhibition prompts us to reflect on the coded language of fashion, the semiotics of style.

Sargent was born to American parents in Florence in 1856. As a child he lived in several European countries, before training and establishing his artistic reputation in Paris.

In 1882 Sargent was so taken with fellow American-in-Paris, the beautiful Virginie Gautreau, that he convinced her to pose for a life-size portrait without a commission. He presented her in a long black evening gown with a plunging neckline, her arms and neck bare, her face turned to one side in a classical pose – and with one of the jewelled dress straps slipping from her shoulder.

French society was scandalised by the ‘indecency,’ and both Sargent and his sitter were stung by the criticism. The artist repainted the strap in an upright position and left Paris soon afterwards. He kept the painting, subsequently called ‘Madame X’, until after Gautreau’s death.

‘I suppose it is the best thing I have done.’

John Singer Sargent - Madame X (with a vintage photo of the original portrait)

In 1886 Sargent settled in London, joining a social circle of actors, artists, composers and writers. His studio on Tite Street in Chelsea had previously been home to the painter James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde lived opposite. 

Although Sargent painted a number of British aristocrats, for the most part his clientele was international new money. Their wealth derived from finance, commerce and industry, and they were set on securing social status – by buying grand houses and estates; by keeping the right company, hosting magnificent parties and making appropriate marriages. The clothes they wore and the portraits they commissioned all contributed to the process of assimilation. A striking portrait would attract large crowds at exhibition. It would be much discussed and broadly reproduced. And a full-length Sargent could cost around $120,000 in today’s money. The exhibition curators term this phenomenon the ‘economy of images’.

Almost half of Sargent’s female sitters wore black gowns. While black retained its association with mourning, in the late 19th century it became fashionable for women of all ages, not least because new synthetic aniline dyes enabled an intense pure depth of colour. When, on a visit to his friend Claude Monet, Sargent discovered that there was no black paint to be found, he declared that he simply couldn’t work.

John Singer Sargent - Lady Sassoon

This period also saw the rise of haute couture. Name brands like Paquin or Doucet provided their clients with what novelist Edith Wharton described as ‘social armour.’ Many of Sargent’s sitters wore outfits from Charles Worth, an English designer who dominated Parisian fashion, and catered particularly to British and American customers. A Worth gown would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 today.

‘I have Delacroix’s sense of colour and I compose. A toilette [a complete ensemble, from the French word toile, cloth] is as good as a painting.'
Charles Worth

In the exhibition, Sargent’s work is displayed alongside examples of period fashion, including several original garments featured in his paintings. Although the artist claimed that ‘I only paint what I see,’ throughout the gallery we can observe where he has adjusted a strap here, removed a bow there. He clearly styled his sitters, pinning, draping, tucking and folding their gowns to create new shapes and textures. For his portrait of Lady Sassoon, he pinned her black silk taffeta opera cloak, so that the bright lining was more visible, creating a dramatic river of pink.

Foreshadowing today’s Instagram culture, one French critic noted, ‘there is now a class who dress after pictures, and when they buy a gown ask ‘will it paint?’’

Sargent was just as interested in painting fashionable men as women.

The surgeon Samuel Pozzi stands proud in a red dressing gown and Turkish slippers, one hand on heart and the other toying with the cord of his robe.

John Singer Sargent - Dr Pozzi at Home

The debonair Lord Ribblesdale looks rather superior in a long dark velvet-collared coat, buff breeches and polished black boots. Sporting grey kid gloves and a hunting whip, the elegant outfit is completed with a top hat and flamboyant silk muffler tied to one side. It was said of Ribblesdale that ‘he never stepped out of his picture frame.’

Sargent painted the young illustrator and designer W Graham Robertson holding a jade-topped walking stick and wearing a long, black wool Chesterfield overcoat. Robertson recalled that, during the sittings, the artist would ‘pull and drag the unfortunate coat more and more closely around me until it might have been draping a lamp-post.’ Sargent subsequently declared:

‘The coat is the picture.’

John Singer Sargent - W Graham Robertson

All in all, it’s a splendid exhibition, full of glamour, performance and personality.

Whilst marvelling at the flamboyance of the fashions featured in Sargent’s portraits, we may imagine that the sartorial codes and social values of late 19th century high society are a million miles away from our own. Surely we live in a more liberated, egalitarian world of informal attitudes and casualised style.

But clothes continue to signal something about our individual identity and sense of belonging. 
In the first half of my career, I dressed casually for work. Until my clients donned trainers, chinos and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. I promptly switched to city suits, keen to create some distance and differentiation. I was amused to learn that Sargent played a similar game. While painting his clientele in their elegant finery, he himself tended to wear a sober business suit.

On encountering the artist in 1899, the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt described him as ‘a rather good-looking fellow in a pot hat, whom at my first sight I took to be a superior mechanic.’

Whether we like it or not, we are constantly judging and being judged.


'When you wear your high-heeled boots with your hip-hugger suit,
It's all right, you're outta sight.
And you wear that cute mini-skirt with your brother's sloppy shirt,
I admit it, girl, that I can dig it.

When you wear your bell bottom pants,
I just stand there in a trance.
I can't move, you're in the groove.
Would you believe, little girl, that I am crazy about you?

When you wear those big earrings, long hair and things,
You got style, girl, that sure is wild.
And you wear that cute trench coat and you're standing and posing,
You got soul, you got too much soul.’

Brenton Wood, 'The Oogum Boogum Song’ (A Smith)

No. 474

John Craxton: The Heroic Hedonist

Still Life Sailors (1980-85) Estate of John Craxton

I recently took the train to Chichester to see an excellent exhibition of the art of John Craxton. (Pallant House Gallery, until 21 April 2024)

Though born and raised in England, Craxton produced much of his work in Greece. There he portrayed an Arcadia of ordinary folk living under a hot sun, amongst olive trees and asphodels, wild cats and frolicking goats. He painted young men smoking in the morning, sleeping in the afternoon and dancing into the night. His art is full of colour, light and movement. It is a joyous celebration of life, and prompts us to consider our own attitudes to work and play.

‘As a child I enjoyed a happy, near-Bohemian home life in a large family.’

Craxton was born in London in 1922. When his father, a pianist and composer, scored his only hit - ‘Mavis,’ sung by the legendary Irish tenor John McCormack - he took his wife and six children down to Selsey on the south coast and bought a shack above the beach.

Craxton had an idyllic childhood.

‘In what now seems like a succession of endless, if not cloudless, summer days, I ran barefoot, rode ponies, shrimped at low tide, collected fossils from the Bracklesham Beds, went to the movies, carried milk from the farm (which still had a working windmill) and had family picnics on the beach.’

Craxton decided as a young boy that all he wanted was to be an artist. He attended various schools, but emerged with no qualifications. A naturally independent spirit, he didn’t fancy the discipline of formal creative training either. And so he was largely self-taught, occasionally dropping into art schools to pick up equipment and a little drawing tuition.

Boy on a Blue Chair, 1946 John Craxton

Having failed an army medical, Craxton was excused war service. Always rather charming, witty and spontaneous, he fell in with various sponsors, lovers and artists, and one patron funded a studio in St John’s Wood that he shared with Lucian Freud.

His early work featured quiet country lanes, twisted trees and dead animals; solitary souls in melancholy, menacing landscapes. During the war years he was given his first solo exhibitions in London, and was commissioned to produce book designs – a line of work that served him well for much of his life.

But Craxton was keen to get away from Britain. As a teenager he had been enchanted by the ancient Greek figurines and pottery he encountered at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Dorset. He aspired to a Mediterranean idyll.

‘The willow trees are nice and amazing here, but I would prefer an olive tree growing out of a Greek ruin.’

John Craxton by Felix H. Man
bromide print, 1940s© estate of Felix H. Man / National Portrait Gallery, London

Immediately after the hostilities ended, there were still strict restrictions on travel. So Craxton and Freud embarked on a painting expedition to the Scilly Isles, and then stowed away on a Breton fishing boat bound for France. They only got as far as Penzance. 

The following year Craxton made it to Zurich, where he met the wife of a British ambassador at dinner. She offered him a lift to Athens in a bomber she had borrowed for a curtain-buying trip. 

And so, aged 23, Craxton arrived in Greece and immediately fell under its spell. He settled first in Poros, and then Crete, and he would stay there, on and off, for the rest of his life.

‘It’s possible to be a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all. In a life of reality my imagination really works. I feel like an émigré in London and squashed flat.’

In Greece Craxton created romantic landscapes populated by shepherds, peasants and a pipe-playing Pan. He painted the azure sea and cyan sky; bare footed young men in white cotton trousers and striped tee shirts - working, relaxing, dancing arm-in-arm. His art has vibrant colours and a gentle cubism. And by contrast with his previous work, there’s an exultant spirit, a dreamy languor, a warm conviviality. We meet a rugged herdsman, a smoking butcher, a grey-bearded octopus fisherman. Here are moustached mariners tucking into a meal of seafood and salad at the local taverna. A sign on the wall behind them warns against breaking plates.

‘The most wonderful sound in the world is of people talking over a good meal.’

Craxton was fond of saying that 'Life is more important than art.’ He relished the freedom he had on the Greek islands - to ride his Triumph Trophy motorcycle along dirt roads and mountain tracks; to talk and laugh at the dockside bars, as he drank ouzo and feasted on cuttlefish and calamari; to lead an openly gay life. 

At the time Greece was a more tolerant place than Britain - although Craxton's interest in young men in uniform did prompt the authorities to suspect he was spying. When homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK in 1967, he sent the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, a picture.

As well as painting, Craxton designed book jackets for the travel writer Paddy Leigh Fermor; and created stage sets for Frederick Ashton at the Royal Ballet. But he was not particularly industrious. His friends joked that he suffered from ‘procraxtonation.’

Pastoral for PW John Craxton

Craxton suggests that a creative life need not be fuelled by anxiety and pain. It doesn’t have to be all about struggle and denial. Rather we can choose to follow our dreams; pursue our passions; seek out the sun. 

Craxton, who was made a British honorary consul in Crete, was never concerned by artistic fashion or the opinions of the establishment. He carried on painting in his own individual style into his later years, and he rode his motorbike until nearly 80. When he died aged 87, his ashes were scattered in Chania harbour. 

His biographer Ian Collins described him as ‘a heroic hedonist.’

 
'My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine.
Everybody loves the sunshine.
Sunshine, everybody loves the sunshine.
Sunshine, folks get down in the sunshine.
Sunshine, folks get 'round in the sunshine.
Just bees and things and flowers.
My life, my life, my life, my life in the sunshine.
Everybody loves the sunshine.
Feel, what I feel, when I feel, what I feel,
When I'm feeling, in the sunshine.
Do what I do, when I do, what I do,
When I'm doing, in the sunshine.
Sunshine, everybody loves the sunshine.'

Roy Ayers, 'Everybody Loves The Sunshine' 

No. 453

Philip Guston’s Art of Anxiety: Not Inventing, But Revealing

Dawn (1970), Philip Guston, oil on canvas. Glenstone Museum, Maryland

‘Well, it could be all of us. We’re all hoods.’
Philip Guston

I recently visited a fine exhibition of the work of Philip Guston. (Tate Modern, London, until 25 February)

Guston was a fiercely political artist, raging at injustices he saw all around him. He articulated his anger and anxiety through narrative murals and allegorical paintings, through abstract works and depictions of dark cartoonish nightmares. He was a restless soul who believed the role of the artist was not to invent fictions, but to reveal truths. He pleads with us to care, and prompts us to reflect on the enemy within – within our society and within ourselves.

‘I feel that I have not invented so much as revealed in a coded way, something that already existed.’

He was born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913, the youngest of seven children. His Jewish parents had fled persecution in present-day Ukraine. In 1922 the family moved to Los Angeles, where, struggling to make ends meet, his father, a scrap collector, hanged himself in the shed - and 10 year old Phillip found the body. 

Philip Guston in New York, in 1952 Martha Holmes/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images

As a child Goldstein was interested in cartoons and Renaissance art. At 14 he began painting, and enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School where he met Jackson Pollock, who became a life-long friend.

‘I grew up politically in the thirties and I was actively involved in militant movements and so on, as a lot of artists were… I think there was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change.’

Goldstein became politically active as the United States saw the rise of racism and antisemitism; and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. He joined a group of artists creating large-scale narrative murals supporting workers’ rights and resistance to fascism and oppression. 

'Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.’

In 1935, at 22, Goldstein moved to New York where, concerned about the climate of antisemitism, he changed his name to Philip Guston. He was deeply affected by the war in Europe and the Holocaust. And so he turned to his easel and painted the bombing of Guernica; children playing and fighting in ruined townscapes; haunted camp inmates.

‘That’s the only reason to be an artist… to bear witness.’

Martial Memory Philip Guston, 1941, Oil on Canvas

In the late 1940s, suffering a crisis of confidence, Guston destroyed everything he’d been working on. Perhaps he felt figurative painting could not do justice to the horrors that had so recently taken place.  

‘I began to feel that I could really learn, investigate, by losing a lot of what I knew.’

He decided to change course, and immersed himself in New York’s emerging Abstract Expressionist scene, hanging out with Rothko, de Kooning and Kline. 

‘The trouble with recognisable art is that it excludes too much. I want my work to include more. And ‘more’ also comprises one’s doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognising it.’

Standing close to the canvas, Guston painted forms coming into existence – perhaps you can detect a body or a head - using gentle, complementary colours. Critics dubbed him an ‘abstract impressionist.’ His favourite shade was cadmium red, and it would continue to feature strongly in his work for the rest of his career. 

‘I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why.’

Beggar's joys, Philip Guston, 1954–1955 oil on canvas

In the late ‘60s Guston was deeply moved by the Vietnam War and the political upheaval in the United States. 

‘The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?’

Feeling that his art had to make more overt political statements, Guston made a dramatic return to figurative work.

‘The hell with it. I just wanted to draw solid stuff.’

He had always liked comics, and his new images drew on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. He painted cartoonish, blood-spattered Klan figures driving around town in a childish car, pointing at the sights, the legs of a man projecting from the boot. He depicted similar hoods relaxing at home with a cigarette by the window; in the courtroom, at the office and drawn on blackboards - suggesting they were part of the curriculum.

'Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.’

Where previously Guston had shown Klansmen conspiring, in the act of racial assault, here they were engaged in the mundane activities of everyday life. It was as if he was saying: evil is all around us; it is institutional, systemic - in our courts and schools and on our streets; it is hiding in plain sight.

‘My attempt was really not… to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me… I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot?’

Most striking among these works was a picture of a hooded artist at work in the studio, painting himself. 

‘I perceive myself behind the hood.’

The Studio, Philip Guston, 1969 Oil on canvas

Guston implies that we are all complicit in the injustices we see around us. We carry with us our own prejudices and partialities; our unconscious biases; our inertia and failure to act. We should turn our critical faculties on ourselves.

'There is another man within me that’s angry with me.’
Thomas Browne

Guston presented his startling new work at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1970. But the show was not a success and he only sold one painting. Critics were hugely disappointed that he had deserted the abstract cause, and he lost friends as a result. 

‘There is nothing to do now, but paint my life; my dreams, surroundings, predicament, desperation, [my wife] Musa – love, need.’

Depressed at the response, Guston turned to painting strange dreamscapes populated by objects that meant something to him – mental junk that he called ‘crapola.’ Repeatedly he depicted cigarettes, irons, clocks and steaming kettles; clocks, blinds and bare bulbs; sinister dangling light-pulls. And everywhere there were old shoes and severed legs - echoes of the Holocaust.

'The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.’

In 1973 Guston painted himself: pastrami-pink, indolent, smoking in bed with a plate of ketchupped chips on his chest and a stack of shoes at his side. There’s a bare light bulb and a light-pull. His paintbrushes sit unused. It’s a desolate image. 

Interviewer: Do you think of yourself as kind of pessimistic?

Guston: I don’t think it’s pessimistic. I think it’s doomed.

In 1980 Guston died of a heart attack, in Woodstock, New York. He was 66.

Smoking, Eating . Philip Guston (1973). Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam/The Estate of Philip Guston

Guston was clearly a melancholy figure. But he demonstrated that, even at our lowest ebb, we can find some solace in art. He teaches us to be restless; to embrace radical change when we’re running out of steam; to see the enemy within; and to turn our critical judgement on ourselves. 

‘Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.’

'People just ain't no good,
I think that's well understood.
You can see it everywhere you look,
People just ain't no good.

It ain't that in their hearts they're bad.
They can comfort you, some even try.
They nurse you when you're ill of health,
They bury you when you go and die.
It ain't that in their hearts they're bad.
They'll stick by you if they could.
Ah, but that's just bullshit, baby.
People just ain't no good.

People they ain't no good.
People they ain't no good.
People they ain't no good at all.’

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,'People Ain't No Good’ (N Cave)

No. 445