Poet in the Gallery
Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature 12 February – 3 May 2004 Tate Britain
“I have been here before.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s words haunt me. When I visited my first Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, as a student in the 1970s, Vietnam smouldered on our small televisions, debates and demonstrations flared on the justice of a war. We have indeed been here before.
Back then, I was bitterly disappointed by Rossetti’s paintings, oppressed by the dream-doomed women, startled by the sketchiness of the technique. But the best lines of his poems slid effortlessly into my mind, and stayed there. If, thirty years later, Rossetti’s poetry is now rather neglected, the art of the Pre-Raphaelites certainly is not. Millais’s Ophelia floats on cards; Morris’s leaves crowd carrier bags. I am glad of this, for the soft underbelly of the Arts and Crafts movement was, and remains, price. Who can afford hand-made furniture? Burne-Jones protested that for every locomotive, he would paint an angel. But it is technology, especially digital reproduction, which has loosed the Pre-Raphaelites everywhere.
Sheep, not angels, are omnipresent in this exhibition. It does not cover the “poetic” Pre-Raphaelites I knew, in their claustrophobic rooms, but painters who walked fourteen miles to catch the afterglow of the moon’s rising.
“Bless love and hope, true soul; for we are here.”
Here are the sheep, on the exhibition’s poster, warmly lit, strangely
encouraging. They loll; they fan out to graze.As a shepherd’s granddaughter, I nod admiringly at the accuracy of the odd curly brown coat, from the stray gene which sparks a “black lamb”. But why two black lambs? Only then do I notice. The flock is poised on the edge of a cliff.
“Holman Hunt. Strayed Sheep” announce the blood-red Gothic letters on the gilt frame. Hunt’s “Light of the World”, with its glowering Christ hammering on a locked door, frowned from the prayer books of my country childhood. This was art with stern (and resistible) designs. “The Light of the World” is not here.
But in the next room there is an eager crowd before a painting whichclaims no more design than to show what “lay out of a back window” at a Hampstead boarding house. A couple, perhaps lovers, sit on a rough slope above trees and a long curve of barn roof, the rich orange red of cardinal polish, whose ridge tiles need some attention, but – for an afternoon – are radiant. (Some of these artists fought to keep the cherished buildings of their local landscape; small bitter wars which we still fight, and, thanks to current demolition law, mostly lose.)
The wall notes to Ford Madox Brown’s “An English Autumn Afternoon” quote Ruskin: “a very ugly subject”. “I don’t think that’s ugly, do you?” says an outraged voice in my ear. Is the tower on the lit horizon a church or a factory? It does not matter. There is a smudge of cloud, a rose echo of the roof ’s red. The glow cannot stay, but its steadiness persuades you it will last for ever. It is the tenderest of illusions.
A young woman takes a letter from a postman, quietly. Her hand is just closing on the letter. The grass of the small lawn is long. The dusk-pink roses straggle above their bed. As I look at Frederick Walker’s “My Front Garden, 1864”, I wonder why our arts so neglect the places in which most of us spend most of our lives, especially the demure and strange suburbs. When did we lose this quiet wholeness?
I shall not find wholeness in Millais’ “Ophelia”. I spoke to a friend about the model, Lizzie Siddal, Rossetti’s wife, shivering in a bath-tub. “But”, cried my friend with startling passion, “that painting is so beautiful”. Lizzie froze for two paintings. Ophelia does not see the landscape. She lies in an animal daze. Around her, painted separately, are crowds of white roses, decrepit teasels, ridges of red-brown willow trunk rough enough to bark her knees. Through
the willow leaves, on the green slur of the water, falls the light.
Kindly sheep, we gallery-goers – students, engineers, coaxed children – praise the foreground detail of these paintings, even borrowing magnifiers to look at oak-galls and drooped bluebells. But the eye flickers over, honours them in passing, then goes straight to the horizons, to light. Along the rough footings of John William Inchbold’s “The Chapel, Bolton”, the deep grass pours with sun. Inchbold is Turner’s heir, but – unlike Turner – he can paint people. In “Venice from the Public Gardens”, the woman leaning over a wall above the evening water has a belt strained tight round a thickening waist. Into the oily gold of the water, Inchbold runs the confused black of posts with bold strokes. On the grey streak of the distant city, he pricks out the tiniest of lights. This is technique so good that it forgets itself. It should not be forgotten that Inchbold painted this when he was ill and short of money; that the Royal Academy never displayed it and the critics called it “a sketch”. But it is here.
Here, also, are two great exceptions, for the works that take our breath are the strayed sheep, gone to places where no one has gone before, and cannot go again. I have seen little pain in these pictures. The green-lit Ophelia will never sink, like Shakespeare’s, to muddy death. Here is Hunt’s “The Scapegoat”. A child pauses beneath it, then stretches up her hand to the long sheen of the goat’s coat, steel-grey, thistle brown. “A beautiful painting”, says an elderly woman, staring at the violet hills.
Slipped back to a world before the Middle Eastern religions (the Celts had a horse goddess, called Epona), I look at the goat’s steady eyes and its halfbared teeth. I am shocked, as nothing has shocked me all day, by a patient, unending suffering; animal, only as humans are animals; God, only as animals are God. Hunt’s art has slipped free of his designs. You will see none of this in reproduction. The goat’s hair is lightless, the hills lurid purple. It is far harder to catch fire in a poem, but reproduction cannot rob it. The poem keeps its own weather.
Though the painters in this exhibition are alert to each shift of season,
each half-inch furl of fern, any sense of weather is strangely absent. The exception is the Liverpool painter,William Davis. In his painting “Harrowing”, the horizon is a glare of pale light. Above, a black ledge of cloud bears down. The fine net of trees on the left is too sharp. A bag crouches, uselessly, at a field edge. A boy, the reins falling slack in his hands, turns, flushed and fearful. Light strikes on the harrow and the two bay horses ahead strain into the wind, heading for the unreachable buildings at the sky’s edge. Boy, horses, even the dry soil they have not yet worked, will be harrowed by the freezing rain.
This dark, cracking painting is a masterpiece. Praised by Rossetti’s
brother, wept over by Tennyson, it still cuts, sharp as wind, into experience. My father, aged fourteen, walked behind a plough. I drive from my dry shabby suburb to hunch behind the soaked ears of a shaggy pony, descended from the farm horses of Wales. A lorry driver who keeps a horse at the same stables is recovering from pleurisy, caught as he struggled with a broken-down car transporter in a February rainstorm.Weather is still inescapable. And what of climate? These artists painted glaciers. The Victorians feared an Ice Age. The melting of Antarctic ice could take our Gulf Stream. Faced with global warming, we have, indeed, been sheep. The wars against and about that have not even begun.
I leave the exhibition reluctantly. Like the best of its paintings, its
painstaking work ends in vision. It washes the eyes. I see the whipped twigs above the Thames, the pale flash of tails as four deer feed between a wood and a motorway, the rich red lights of cars streaming ahead of my speeding coach. Yet I am struck by a kind of sorrow.
I am haunted not by a picture, but the hunger of a voice. “That painting is so beautiful.” Here is a word the critic would reach for with care, and I – as I wrestle with commas and line-endings – forget. But today, between coaches and coffee, before ivy leaves, horizons, and the chains of harrows, I heard it constantly, and with it, praise of the underpinning technique whose strength honoured its subject and its viewer. (It is the clarity of rhyme and rhythm which make Rossetti’s lines shine in the memory. The music of a poem is not a lure or a distraction, but lies at the heart of its sense. It is the music of our lives.)
I listen again to the voice.What did she see in that picture? A decorative surface, the green glitter of Ophelia’s water? An escape from bills, buses, and wrinkles into illusion, tolerated treachery, the dream of art, which falters, then gives back to us the stumbling of the heart? That hunger is almost physical, but it has another boundary, which gleams, remembered, at the edge of mind, of life; and more. It is our deepest echo. “I have been here before”.
Page(s) 103-106
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