Of Trills in the Night
A Few Words of Introduction:
Of late, the time required by my day job has left me with so little to dedicate to newsletters that an open invitation to my friends and colleagues has gone out in the hope that the respite provided by expected guests will afford me the time to not discontinue them entirely. So, as you can well imagine, I was delighted when Imola Unger replied to my invitation.
No stranger to the strange land that constitutes the geography of the site, she has often contributed help and thoughts. Texts insightful, thought-provoking, impeccably researched, grammatically irreproachable, and always delivered with illustrations and captions. A perfect guest.
(Guest writers always find the welcome mat out. I leave a light on as well, sometimes there’s even coffee.)
And, as you’ll see, like the nightingale, Imola has a voice distinctly her own.
~~~
Of Trills in the Night
A plain, unsightly bird; mostly invisible to the eye, wrapped in the cloak of the night. Or is it the night that is wrapped into the velvety birdsong?
When I first thought of writing a piece on nightingales, I was listening to this playing live outside my window. I realize that perhaps “velvet” is the wrong word to use: aside from the pleasant, smooth association, it has an almost adhesive, heavy quality to it. Nothing could be further from the effortless trill of the nightingale: bubbling like a forest stream, scented as the air in May, as full of light as the night around it is devoid of it. It was an elated, inexplicably peaceful sensation.
It was not a particularly pleasant time in my life and it was soothing to let that airy song fill my senses. I was reminded of the story of the Chinese emperor from whose bedside Death itself had departed upon hearing the song of the nightingale. Hans Christian Andersen, was it? I seemed to recall night-colored illustrations by none other than Edmund Dulac. And didn’t it make an appearance in numerous other narratives, all somewhat dark and painfully sweet? I quickly began to list in my mind the stories where the nocturnal bird lets its trills be heard—and consequently, fates change, within the beat of a wing.
The Nightingale
The nightingale is an insectivorous alar biped. Furthermore, it’s a migratory, nocturnal oviparous passerine. Now you have a pretty good idea where to place it but here are some photos of it anyway, just in case.
The first picture is the copyright of Brian Cocksedge. The other two are works of unknown photographers.
Its plumage is an understated, unremarkable brownish gray. Its singing, however, is extraordinary and inimitable, even inconceivable to the human mind. So much so that in the history of mankind, countless stories emerged explaining what this simple little creature owes its phenomenal voice to. The explanatory myths, however, have been consistently wrong in one aspect: they all attribute the sweet song to the throat of a female bird, whereas it is the males whose mating song delights us so. The female nightingales are silent.
“One legend about the origin of this bird features a fickle shepherdess who keeps postponing her wedding date. Her fiancé, driven to distress and sleeplessness by her inconsistency, magically turns her into a nightingale and curses her with the same insomnia her delays have caused him.”1
It is remarkable that transforming into a nightingale is meant as punishment in this story, and it is not the only one, either. It makes one wonder what seems so miserable about the bird’s condition as to make it so highly undesirable for humans, but aside from its “insomniac” nature (which does indeed constitute some of the worst suffering for most of us humans), nothing comes to mind.
The nightingale’s seeming inability to sleep gave rise to superstitions. It was thought that if someone drank a potion with the eyes of a nightingale hidden in it, “[they] would soon die of sleeplessness.”2 It was also believed that by eating its heart, one would inherit its magical artistic powers, envied by many a poet and musician (though I’m sure that some people would dispute whether their talent is a blessing or a curse). In ancient Greek, they went so far as to make the words for “poet(ry)” and “nightingale” interchangeable (aedon)3.
The nightingale has indeed tickled human fancy since Greek times. One of the earliest appearances of the bird is a tale in Hesiod’s poem “Works and Days.” The fable was later picked up by Aesop again, and it bore the title “The Hawk and the Nightingale,” but it also lived on in La Fontaine’s “The Kite and the Nightingale.” The story is very simple: a nightingale is seized by a predator bird, and when it cries out in terror, the capturer responds:
“Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or else let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.”
Henry Walker Herrick’s illustration of a mid-Victorian edition of Croxall’s The Fables of Aesop, Fable LXIV. 1865
Like Andersen’s story referenced (far) below, the hawk’s tale also tells of a golden era of innocence overshadowed by the practical and tangible aspects of an industrial age. A certain version of the story recounts the nightingale’s offer to delight the hawk/kite with its song in exchange for its life; an idea that the predator scornfully dismisses. The moral of the story is: “an empty stomach has no ear.” A surprisingly learned Wikipedia article calls it “a statement against the intangibility of art” as well as “a lesson in practicality.” It is almost endearing to think that what we consider an uncorrupt era of pastoral Greek bliss was seen by Hesiod as an already contaminated state of mankind. His concept of a “golden age” went even further back in history; and theirs, in turn, even further. (It does give one the uncomfortable notion that we have not advanced in all these millennia as far as we aspired to. Well, at least the golden age is before us rather than in the distant past.)
This was also the period when the story of Procne and Philomela was first sung (though the version I’m recounting here4 is based on a Roman retelling of the tale). Philomela, on the way to visit her sister, was captured and raped by her brother-in-law, the King of Thrace, who consequently locked her into a cabin in the woods, where he continued to abuse and beat her. As a precaution, he cut out her tongue lest she should be able to share her misery.
(I cannot resist a little detour here: she was deprived of what was perceived as her greatest power and sharpest weapon: speaking. It is strange to think that the idea continues to live on today in the form of jokes about women’s gossiping, a weapon that indeed seems successful at keeping men away…)
Philomela, however, found a way to send word to her sister by way of a tapestry she wove, depicting the horrors she had endured. (And yet another short deviation from the storyline: weaving, sewing and spinning frequently crop up in tales as the occupations relegated for women. Think about Snow White’s mother sewing by the wintry window; Penelope weaving by day and undoing by night, waiting in loyalty for her husband Odysseus to return; or the industrious girl in the story of Mother Holle, spinning by the fountain. [We shouldn’t dismiss the Parcae either, for that matter; three women pulling the strings of life, the Fates. {Soon there will be no parentheses for me to use. «Though I hope that doesn’t come to pass.»}] Since the monotony of these activities was often made more endurable by sharing tales, the idea of storytelling is deeply interwoven with them [pun intended]. (This is where expressions such as “to spin a yarn” originate from.)
In the end, the tapestry, deciphered by Procne, indeed contributed to setting Philomela free, and the two sisters plotted a terrible revenge on the King. They fed him his own son, unbeknownst to him. When he discovered what had happened, in his rage he grabbed an axe and attacked the two women. However, to prevent further carnage, Zeus intervened and turned them all into birds. You guessed it; Philomela’s new form took that of a nightingale. (Actually, and this is the last parenthesis in this heading, I promise, in Ovid’s version it is Procne that is turned into a nightingale, but for convenience’s sake let us just assume I referred to other versions.) As the Greek legend has us believe, the doleful aria of the bird is nothing other than Philomela’s voice regained, ever singing about her adversity. This tale is the reason why the nightingale is often called philomel in poetry.
William Adolphe Bouguereau: Procne and Philomela. It was something of an effort to find an image that did not depict the beheaded child or Philomela being raped.
In classic literature, the nightingale’s little breast heaves with the melodies of melancholy love. According to Wikipedia, Philomel’s tale was a great contributor to this notion: “because of the violence associated with the myth, the nightingale’s song was long interpreted as a lament.” In consequent centuries the nightingale sings of feelings unrequited, love unfulfilled or otherwise made impossible. The classic example is Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose, where the small songbird offers its own life for the happiness of a young man. Witnessing his misery because he cannot find a red rose to bring to his beloved, the bird lets a thorn pierce its breast and heart. Combined with the power of its most beautiful song, the blood flowing from its heart creates a magical red rose on a dead bush. If you think the detailed description of the thorn pushing deeper into the bird’s chest is cruel, wait until you find out the ending. The girl throws the rose away and informs the student that she decided to go to the ball with a richer man. There’s some crude naturalism for you. (I’m almost sure Oscar Wilde never woke to the nightingale’s song on a spring night.) It does contribute to mythologizing the bird, though.
The Nightingale and the Rose, Illustrator unknown
Not every tale of love in which the nightingale features is woebegone, however. The classic disconsolate tone in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is sharply contrasted with the description of the bird’s cheery summer song, blissfully unaware of the “leaden-eyed despairs” of humans and the suffering that sheer breathing constitutes. The gloom reaches its pinnacle in the following lines:
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
The first line is a shocker. Its brevity and minimalism of expression yield a brutal impact. Its darkness would defy the mirth imparted by the birdsong that is referred to. Fortunately, we are anchored in romanticism now, and naturally, the “full-throated ease” of the nightingale triumphs over the lugubriousness of the human listener. Almost as if Keats had to keep his spirits under control, though, he does manage to sneak in some spleenful “gloom.” But aside from that, it is a deeply beautiful image, really; summer breezes blowing light into a mossy green nocturnal forest scene. (I hope you noticed the rhythm.) The sky, imbued with supernatural mysticism, becomes heaven; and the nightingale (“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!”) ceases to be a transient creature. Yet it is not a pedestal of poesy that he elevates the bird onto. I believe he fell under the spell of the same sense of unjustifiable beauty that the originators of ancient legends were possessed by. It was not a metaphor of “joy against all odds” or even poetic eloquence that he perceived in the bird’s unremarkable appearance and majestic song. He rather saw the physical bird itself as something magical and ever present in the world, far above human concerns and misery.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown.
Portrait of Keats, listening to a nightingale on Hampstead Heath. Joseph Severn. c.1845. Isn’t the bird cleverly hidden?
W.J. Neatby: Illustration of Ode to a Nightingale. From: A Day With Keats by May Clarissa Gillington. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913. (Part of the “Days with Poets” series)
And an emperor it was, indeed, that elevated the healing powers of the birdsong to new heights, and made the nightingale myth widely known to children all around the world. Its Lebensfreude and majestic singing, in stark contrast to its plain appearance, is what Andersen investigates in his story called (unsurprisingly) “The Nightingale”. The emperor of China (as foreseen by Keats, who preceded Andersen by half a century) found out from foreign reports of his own country that all else in it pales next to the marvel that is the nightingale, a creature he had never heard of. In a remote corner of his gardens (that he has never been to) a maid revealed to his gentlemen and ladies-in-waiting the usual dwelling place of the little bird, who was subsequently taken to the emperor.
I have not found an exact title for this image by Vilhelm Pedersen, but it obviously depicts the moment when the scullery maid reveals the nightingale’s hiding place.
Edmund Dulac: I have not been able to locate the title of the first image, but it’s the same scene as Pedersen’s illustration. The second Dulac image is titled The Same Gurgling. The gurgling refers to the voice of the nightingale: the ladies-in-waiting took water into their mouths to reproduce the birdsong. How presumptuous.
Its songs brought tears of joy into his eyes, a feat that the nightingale considered its greatest reward. The bird was then held in captivity to delight the emperor and his court at any and all times, until a package came from Japan. It contained a manmade replica of the real nightingale, studded with gems and precious stones and able to sing one of the nightingale’s songs5.
Then they had to sing together, but they did not get on very well, for the real nightingale sang in its own way, and the artificial one could only sing waltzes.
“There is no fault in that,” said the music-master; “it is perfectly in time and correct in every way!”6
And while the entire court listened to the standardized song of the artificial nightingale with delight, the real bird took flight and left the palace. The music master reasoned that the reliability and predictability of a human construction was much to be preferred to the capricious, unexpected tunes of the real bird. Here one cannot be so sure there is no metaphor involved, unlike in Keats’s case. And the irony of the present situation does not escape me, either; after all, I began by showing you a digital recording of the nightingale’s song…
There’s another tongue-in-cheek aspect in the story that has a special (though not in any way pleasant) significance for me. Trying to demonstrate the superiority of the manmade machine, “the music master wrote five-and-twenty volumes about the artificial bird; the treatise was very long and written in all the most difficult Chinese characters.” I hope I do not resemble the poor fellow with the present long-winded commentary. (And in my defence, there is always the urge to use select words when addressing an audience trained on John’s newsletters.)
Needless to say, the artificial bird broke at one point (to modern ears, an allusion to the unsustainability of our machine-based lifestyle, or perhaps a reference to the planned obsolescence conspiracy). But the most precious twist in the tale is certainly the moment when the real nightingale returns to the deathbed of the emperor to sing him back to life. Surrounding his bed are his own deeds in the form of talking faces (certainly an eerie idea, depicted by Vilhelm Pedersen, Andersen’s first illustrator, who was best known for his illustrations of this tale. Thankfully, Dulac spared us that spectacle at least; though his maniac, slightly Mayan-inspired Death is alarming, to say the least). To suppress the accusatory voices, the emperor calls for music.
Two illustrations of the same scene: talking heads as deeds, by Pedersen, and Dulac’s Death listening intently.
A photograph of Vilhelm Pedersen, who made the illustrations for the first edition of Andersen’s Eventyr og historier (Fairy Tales and Stories)
“Suddenly, close to the window, there was a burst of lovely song; it was the living nightingale, perched on a branch outside. It had heard of the emperor’s need, and had come to bring comfort and hope to him. As it sang the faces round became fainter and fainter [...]. Even Death himself listened to the song and said, ‘Go on, little nightingale, go on!’”
I find it an especially beautiful touch that the nightingale did not drive Death away by singing something unbearably lively, but by evoking the subdued mourning atmosphere of the cemetery that “brought to Death a longing for his own garden.” It is a bird of longing, after all. To the emperor it sang of healing and of vivacity, “and the blood coursed with fresh vigour in the emperor’s veins and through his feeble limbs.”
Others, far earlier in history, also dedicated tributes to the bird’s gleeful, lively trills instead of perceiving only melancholy tones in its song. Sappho, for example, in a poetic fragment, evokes the nightingale’s joyful aspect, calling it “the messenger of spring, the sweet voiced nightingale.” … [The bird’s song] connotes not only heartache and grief, but also renewed vitality; not only autumnal melancholy, but also springtime rejoicing.”7
It is this springtime rejoicing that Chaucer invokes in “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” telling of a night in early May; a reference to the then well-known superstition that the nightingale is a good omen.
But as I lay this other night waking,
I thought how lovers had a tokening,
And among them it was a common tale,
That it were good to hear the nightingale
Rather than the lewd cuckoo sing.
He describes an early spring scene where he witnesses a row between the two birds. The cuckoo (a bad omen) condemns love as a source of suffering, while the little nightingale, a champion of passion, reassures the poet that he should pay no heed to the cuckoo’s words.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge openly contradicts the gloomy symbolism usually associated with the bird, referencing a line by Milton:
“’Most musical, most melancholy” bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
(...)
First named these notes a melancholy strain.
(The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem, lines 13–22)
The stanza is very much in line with Keats’s belief that suffering is very human and egocentric; the little songbird perched upon a branch is far above it, literally and figuratively. Besides, these lines were a source of personal pride for me: I was not as self-centered as the man in the poem, after all. As I was listening to the trills that night in early May, all I could hear was playfulness, zest for life; and, yes, the nightingale’s enjoyment of hearing its own song.
The Mistle Thrush
The nightingale was generally seen as a symbol for love and longing, but also a good omen; a feature it shares with the mistle thrush, often a symbol of protection and guidance in tales. I had just read and reread a few stories featuring either of the birds and was musing on their similarities. When I started researching the subject, I realized that the nightingale is a member of the thrush family. Now, there’s a link worth investigating, I thought. The following brief detour is the result.
Turdus viscivorus, illustration by Simon Schmidt. Gouache.
In The Secret Garden8, Mary has an internal struggle whether she may entrust the secret of the garden’s existence to her new friend Dickon. Turning back from the gate, she voices her worries, to which his reassuring reply is:
“If tha’ was a missel thrush an’ showed me where thy nest was, does tha’ think I’d tell any one? Not me,” he said. “Tha’ art as safe as a missel thrush.”
And she was quite sure she was.
Mary was not disappointed in Dickon: the mistle thrush, a good omen, kept her secret safe; just like it did the entrance to the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit. On Thror’s map, in moon-letters, the instructions to the gate said: “stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks” and the setting sun will illuminate the entrance. So it happened: just when the company’s morale had sunken to unprecedented lows, the guidance of the thrush filled them with hope and joy once again. “There on the grey stone in the grass was an enormous thrush, nearly coal black, its pale yellow breast freckled with dark spots. Crack! It had caught a snail and was knocking it on the stone. (...) The old thrush, who had been watching from a high perch with beady eyes and head cocked on one side, gave a sudden trill.” And to the birdsong, “a flake of rock split from the wall and fell,” revealing the entrance to the depths of the mountain.9
Alan Lee’s pencil drawing of the thrush for the Hobbit, HarperCollins edition, 2008.
Following a prophecy that was several centuries old, a bird showed the whereabouts of the secret gate to the company of dwarves. It appeared to be cracking a snail open, unsuspecting and acting as it would in nature, but its action became supernatural in that it complied with the prophecy. In The Secret Garden, it was yet another small passerine, a robin, also formerly classed as a thrush family member, that showed Mary the entrance to the garden. Now, what is it about the Turdidae family? Is there some kind of thrush conspiracy going on? They must have realized we are in on the secret and they lead us to re-class them, I should think…
Yes, birds were believed to represent souls in various belief systems. Owls, doves, eagles and ravens all had their supernatural powers and mythological significance. But why isn’t, say, the stork a legendary bird? Just what is it about these tiny songbirds? For the beauty of their song is the only distinguishing (and uniting) feature I could find about the former and present family members of the Turdidae: “[t]he songs of some species (...) are considered to be among the most beautiful in the avian world.”10 Is it really their ability to sing that bestows supernatural powers on them in human imagination?
Summary of a Birdsong
There is an intrinsic need in us humans to trace anything so exquisitely beautiful as the nightingale’s song back to ourselves. This is some form of self-verification, perhaps; reassurance that we ARE the most artistic and refined creatures on the planet. If inexplicable beauty comes along, we have to make it human by devising origin myths (surely, it could only have been a human being that was transformed into the first nightingale), vesting human characteristics into them (such as the ability to feel miserable and self-pitying), or making them engage in human pastimes (singing contests, for example, as Pliny would have us believe). We shape them into the likeness of our own intellectual pursuits (it obviously exists only to be a metaphor of poetry) and we envy their zest for life (even though we could easily have our own). It is very hard to believe, to accept, that something can exist in its own beauty, uninfluenced by us, purely on its own terms. We have made up our comfort of intellectual and artistic refinement, our convenience of machines and devices to aid our lives. Yet our problems and questions have been the same for thousands of years, and none of our inventions and constructs have offered solace or solution.
There is that unsightly little bird singing in the pitch black night; a bird who should know better, for night is when the hunters are out; and disregarding all darkness and danger, it sings full-throatedly of the joy of being alive in this instant. For millennia we have tried to explain it away with myths and biological observation, decipher it through the language of poetry and love, interpret it with gender studies and class questions; and the bottom line is so freakishly simple, it is almost unacceptable, almost dumb. Because, really, it is all about lying in bed on an early spring night, accepting the indescribable beauty unquestioningly through your pores, being at peace, and “feeling the blood course with fresh vigour in your veins.”
Footnotes:
1. Octarium Salutes Nature Program Notes.
2. Squidoo entry on bird symbolism
3. Jeni Williams: Interpreting Nightingales: Gender, Class and Histories. 1997
4. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 4.
5. In truth, each specimen knows a variety of songs.
6. H.C. Andersen: The Nightingale.
7. James C. McKusick: The Return of the Nightingale
8. By Frances Hodgson Burnett, Gutenberg Project version
9. J.R.R.Tolkien: The Hobbit, p. 268. HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2008. Illustrations by Alan Lee. The other one.
10. Thrush (bird) entry on Wikipedia.
Text © Imola Unger. Used with permission
~~~
POSTSCRIPTUM
Following the newsletter about Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, we received a photograph of her memorial, added here as a fitting postscript to the story of her life and work.
Sincere thanks to Robert Stephenson, from “The Friends of Brompton Cemetery, for the photo.
Posted by John on 14/07/12 | 07:59 PM | Chronicles
WAITING FOR THE SUN
Or “Knowledge Does Not Enrich Us”
C. G Jung, in his American travels, spent some time with the Pueblo people of New Mexico. Jung perceived that there was something shared by the entire tribe to which he was not privy. “…the air was filled with a secret known to all the communicants, but to which the whites could gain no access. This strange situation gave me an inkling of Eleusis, whose secret was known to one nation and yet never betrayed. I understood what Pausanias or Herodotus felt when he wrote “I am not permitted to name the name of that god.” This was not, I felt, mystification, but a vital mystery whose betrayal might bring about the downfall of the community as well as of the individual.”
Finally, through doggedness and persistence, he drove the chief of the Taos Pueblos, Ochwiay Biano, (Mountain Lake) to exasperation. On their relations with the Americans, Mountain Lake said:
“…[They] want to stamp out our religion. Why can they not let us alone? What we do, we do not only for ourselves but for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole world. Everyone benefits by it.”
I could observe from his excitement that he was alluding to some extremely important element of his religion. Therefore I asked him: “You think then, that what you do in your religion benefits the whole world?” He replied with great animation, “Of course. If we did not do it, what would become of the world?” And with a significant gesture he pointed to the sun.
…”After all”, he said, “we are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of the Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practising our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.”
I then realized on what the “dignity”, the tranquil composure of the individual Indian, was founded. It springs from his being a son of the sun; his life is cosmologically meaningful, for he helps the father and preserver of all life in his daily rise and descent. If we set this against our own self-justifications, the meaning of our own lives as it is formulated by our reason, we cannot help but see our poverty. Out of sheer envy we are obliged to smile at the Indians’ naïveté and to plume ourselves in our cleverness; for otherwise we would discover how impoverished and down at the heels we are. Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth.
… The idea, absurd to us, that a ritual act can magically affect the sun is, upon closer examination, no less irrational but far more familiar to us than might be assumed. Our Christian religion – like every other, incidentally – is permeated by the idea that special acts or a special kind of action can influence God – for example, through certain rites or by prayer, or by a morality pleasing to the Divinity.”
Jung is never wrong, you can agree or disagree, but you can’t brush him off or dismiss him outright. Nor can you ignore Spence, Frazer, Hawkes, Campbell and so many others, who all say the same thing. But, while reading books is well and good, armchair mythologists like myself might also be inspired to get up early and climb the nearest decent lookout point. Thus, I’ve been catching a lot of sunrises of late. Two reasons for this: I don’t mind rising early on weekends, and there is a lovely climb to the top of a hill nearby from which to see them.
It’s a form of modest trigonometry, the establishment of a lop-sided triangulation with the earth and the sun, and a focalization on the position of things. It seems to me that we spend a good deal of time situating everything in relation to ourselves – how they can be of use to us, whether they matter or not, how to establish a hierarchy that benefits our well-being and advancement – rather than observing where we are in relation to things. While they could be considered one and the same thing, there is nevertheless an inversion of viewpoint, and a certain placing of self outside self, to better see the view.
I enjoy the constantly shifting palette, the contrasts and the juxtapositions of light and shadow. I enjoy the curious combination of static and fleeting, the warm and cold pastels, the moving cloudfield above. (And New Zealand has the most energetic skies, cloud watching in Wellington is like a day at the races.)
While I’m watching, I’m imagining of course. I’m imagining the Earth slowly turning to face the sun, the oceans being slowly lit, the clouds rolling across continents and other generally cosmic musings. (I’m also often wondering why on earth I didn’t pack a second sweater.) This because there is no pretension involved. No affectation or ostentation. Yes, I’m up there making sure the sun rises for the rest of you, but only weekends; after all, I’ve got a day job during the week. Self-styled druids, modern shamans and reinvented sun rituals and the like fill me with skepticism, because they are once more focusing everything on themselves. I just want to disappear for a moment in an infinitely repeated cosmic event, in something so mundane and predictable and enduring that it is, as far as the brief spans of our lives are concerned, infinite. Watching the sun rise is standing on the edge of time.
Standing on the edge of time, by the way, is easier than you might think. Looking at any art object – painting or potsherd – is looking into time. (The same logic pushes me to those places where I cannot go, but only stand on the edge of and look out upon.) The same search for triangulation can take place in front of a painting, or a dusty chipped object in a museum. The essential quality of these things is that they are beyond our influence, they are impervious to us. While we (or the museum) can possess the physical painting or object, the moment of realization is something that cannot be changed, only imagined. I wonder about the materials used, the conversations that took place nearby as it was being painted or fashioned, the patron’s smile or pursed lips, the languages and the accents, the worlds outside the atelier door. I know they are all in the painting somewhere, or the clues to them are, if only I knew a little more. Or, I’m imagining the sun rising on day after day to light an easel. The same sun as today.
I’m imagining all the faces turned to the rising sun over millennia, whether in worship or curiosity, and marveling at our ability to imbue with significance our actions. (Thankfully, mine have none, or none that go beyond a dawn waiting for the sun.) I’m wondering about all these things, because they are complex and (in my case at any rate) disordered thoughts about meaning and symbol, history and understanding, and the rising light illuminates them more clearly than any reading lamp. It doesn’t help me organize them, but it does remind me of their importance, and why it is important not to forget. And, perhaps most fundamentally, I’m doing my best to remind myself how astonishingly beautiful the impermanent, shifting map of the sky can be, and how to capture even just a hint of that quotidian magic in some future painting.
Knowledge does not enrich us. It is simply the elaborate setting into which we set the carefully fashioned jewels of our real riches: thought, memory, intuition and art.
For the armchair reader, when not chasing the sun:
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1963
Jacquetta Hawkes, Man and the Sun. 1962
LIFE UPSIDE DOWN
After over three years (and a pretty sizeable jar full of pencil stubs) in the Antipodes pondering the nature of Hobbits and dwarves, work has recently turned very very busy, and newsletters harder and harder to write. I am counting on a few kind souls who have offered to step in with guest newsletters to rescue me from my self-imposed deadlines and hope nevertheless to be able to carry on at very least monthly and more or less on time. However, with the December release date approaching and post-production going apace, the next months will be busy indeed.
But, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Oh bother. I do believe it’s a dragon.
Posted by John on 15/06/12 | 09:16 PM | Chronicles
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Women of the Golden Age of Illustration: Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
“…The decorative illustrator has usually literature to illustrate, and a commission to be beautiful and imaginative in his work. He has the opportunity of Rossetti, the opportunity for significant art.” 1
~~~
“Therefore all art is illustration, though it rather seems to follow that all illustration is not art.” 2
~~~
“I feel inclined to throw away my palette and brushes. What are my things by the side of stuff such as hers.” 3
~~~
In the edition of The Times of March 14, 1945, the following obituary appeared:
A Versatile Artist. Miss Fortescue-Brickdale RWS, painter, modeller, and
designer of stained glass, and black and white artist died on March 10th
as briefly announced in our columns yesterday. She was the last survivor
of the late Pre-Raphaelite painters, who though - or possibly because -
they did not come into personal contact with the original Brotherhood,
carried some of their principles to extremes. Her nearest affinity was with
the late Byam Shaw, in the period of his “Love’s Baubles”, and she was at the
height of her reputation about the same time as he.
It was the allegorical side of Pre-Raphaelitism that Miss Fortescue-Brickdale
inherited, and her work was distinguished by brilliance of colour and great
fidelity to detail. One of her most successful pictures “The Deceitfulness of
Riches”, is crowded with detail of patterned garment and fruiting trees. As
the title suggests there is often a moral of symbolic meaning behind her
pictures. Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, youngest daughter of the late
Mr M. I. Fortescue-Brickdale, barrister of Lincoln’s Inn was born in 1871. She
studied at Crystal Palace School of Art, and at the Royal Academy Schools,
where in 1896 she won a £40 prize for her design for the decoration of a
public building. Her first appearance in a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
was made the following year. She continued to exhibit there fairly frequently,
her contributions including several portraits.
Her pictures were also seen at the Royal Watercolour Society, but the highly
wrought nature of her work kept her from being a prolific exhibition artist.
Decorative illustration was her natural bent, and typical works of hers were
“The Forerunner” in which Leonardo da Vinci was depicted showing his model
of a flying machine to the Duke of Milan, and “The First visit of Simonetta”. For
the first British Empire Exhibition in 1924 she painted the reredos in the
Chapel of Remembrance. She is represented in the permanent collection of
Liverpool, Leeds, and Birmingham.
As might be expected from the character of her pictures with their brilliant
colours and sharp drawing, Miss Fortescue-Brickdale was successful as a
designer of stained glass, and there is a window by her in Bristol Cathedral.
In his English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, Their Associates, and Successors in 1910
Percy Bate says that she should do much in the future to exemplify the still
living force of Pre-Raphaelitism. Whether or not that prediction was fulfilled,
she deserves to be remembered for her consistent fidelity to the tradition.
~~~
In March 1945, much of Europe was in ruins, WW II was in its final months, with millions dead. The same day as Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s death, over 80,000 Japanese civilians perished under American firebombing of Tokyo. While she endured to perhaps perceive the approaching end of the Second World War, she must have wondered if the world would ever be the same. Recurring ill health and increasing blindness from 1923 onwards, followed by a stroke in 1938, had already largely ended her incredibly prolific career.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale is often cited as the “last” of the Pre-Raphaelites, carrying on almost single-handedly the Pre-Raphaelite dream, though with the reserve that she carried on in form, not always in spirit. According to Simon Houfe4“She represents the last phase of Pre-Raphaelitism, her highly detailed and meaningful little pictures are crammed with medievalism and moral sentiment. She was the ideal illustrator of legend and particularly for those expensive coloured gift books of the 1900s where her bright colours and haughty figures were set off to advantage on the ample pages.”
“Meaningful little pictures” seems curiously dismissive, and the author hints that “those” expensive coloured gift books of the 1900’s were an extravagance and in some way atavistic, and indeed nowadays Eleanor herself is more often than not summed up as the “last” member of the movement. “It cannot be said that Pre-Raphaelitism is dead while Miss Fortescue Brickdale is alive…” The phrase is from The International Studio, Volume 45, November 1911-February 1912. She is portrayed as reluctant to leave a world that in reality had long ago faded like an old watercolour, last actor to leave the stage, long after the applause had turned first to silence and then indifference. Even her obituary in The Times insists: “She was the last survivor of the late Pre-Raphaelite painters, who though - or possibly because - they did not come into personal contact with the original Brotherhood, carried some of their principles to extremes.” While this may have been the world from which she departed, into what world had she come, when she was a young artist, full of promise and ambition?
~~~
If there was a voice speaking for the world of Art in late 19th and early 20th century England, it was to be found in the pages of The Studio. Founded in 1893, The Studio energetically expounded the “New Art” of the times: Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau. (The short-lived mouthpiece of the Vienna Secession, Ver Sacrum (“Sacred Spring”), filled the same role for Jugenstil and the waning Symbolist and Decadent movements from 1898 to 1903.) The role of women in art was a topic often evoked.
Typical is this assertion from “Studio Talk”, published in The Studio, Volume 20, Issue 87, in June 1900:
“As an assertion of what women can do in art, the exhibition at Earl’s Court this year is quite worthy to be taken seriously. It shows very adequately the many directions in which the feminine capacities are progressing under the influence of modern ambitions and present-day educational facilities….”
The article proceeds to list a few notable names, and details another section of the show, dedicated to painters who depict women, concluding: “… As there is, besides, a great number of examples of those crafts in which women excel, the show is clearly acceptable as a sincere effort to fix the place that women should occupy in the modern aesthetic movement.”
The message is plain, if not acceptable to our ears: women can be tolerated as artists, as long as they confine themselves to suitable aspirations, but their real place is in the sitter’s chair (preferably profitably occupied with crocheting or embroidery). Should they wish to risk becoming painters, the conclusion is clear enough:
“Our age has produced a great many women who are painters, but very few painters who are women. The charm of womanliness in art has not been appreciated by the gifted fair, so they have wasted their time and impaired their talents by attempting to be manly. Here and there a great exception has been found, like Madame Morisot in France, and Lady Waterford in England, but the exceptions are very few….”
Another article in The Studio5 goes on: “The art gallery in the Woman’s Exhibition at Earl’s Court is of no little importance as a place where the latest developments in feminine conviction about aesthetic questions are adequately illustrated. It provides what is perhaps the most complete assertion of women’s accomplishment in art that has as yet been made in this country, and gives exceptional opportunities for estimating the value of the effort made by what is called the weaker sex to help in artistic undertakings. The collection brought together includes not only pictures and water-colours, but also black-and-white drawings for illustrations, pastels, etchings, and designs of various kinds; and, besides, a few examples of modelled work are shown. A great deal of what is displayed or exhibited is, as it is apt to be in women’s work, merely expressive of a capacity for imitation, and reflects both in intention and manner the performance of masculine artists of more marked individuality; but there is, as well, an appreciable proportion of really original production in which true feminine qualities of invention and handling assert themselves….”
Even clearer: ”…it is always foolish to imply that the art of women should resemble the art of men. Each should be instinct with the charm of sex, each should be the complement of the other. But in our own time, somehow, most of the women-artists have tried their best to be masculine, while not a few of the men have turned out effeminate work. It may be useless to protest, but this kind of work is sterile, it has no future; the world soon wearies of it, and turns with joy to those men who put manhood into all their pictures or statues, and to those women whose art is charmed with their own natures.”6
These were the decades of the “fin de siècle” world of art, the world into which Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, a young woman of barely 20 years of age, would determinedly step.
~~~
Eleanor’s childhood was blessed with favourable circumstances. Born in the family home on January 25th 1872, daughter of a Lincoln’s Inn barrister, Matthew Inglett Fortescue-Brickdale and Sarah Anna (née Lloyd, daughter of a Bristol judge), she was the youngest of their four children (two boys and two girls - another daughter having died in infancy). Her childhood must have been happy and secure, though in 1894, her father was killed in an alpine accident, an event that must have considerably altered the family’s hitherto comfortable position. Her older brother Charles, 15 years her senior, on whom she apparently doted, (sibling entente which would last throughout their lives) briefly attended John Ruskin’s School of Drawing. Possibly he encouraged his younger sister; probably she emulated him (Eleanor was educated at home). At any rate, when she turned 17, she decided to pursue art herself, and enrolled, first in Crystal Palace School of Art under Herbert Bone and was accepted - on her third try; her determination must have been grand already – at the Royal Academy Schools, where she became a student from January 1895-1900. In 1897 she won a prize for the design of a decorative lunette for the Dining Room at Burlington House. (The prize money allowed her to paint her first major work in oils, inspired by Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”: “The Pale Complexion of True Love”.)
Paintings by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
1. “The Gift that is Better than Rubies”. Dated 1899, an early example of Eleanor’s penchant for depicting her angels with coloured wings, the benevolent spirit stooping over the newborn infant here however showing a quiet grace far removed from the mischievous cupids who would appear in future portraits.
2. “The Pale Complexion of True Love”. This was Eleanor’s first major work, permitted by the prize money for her winning design of a decorative lunette at the Royal Academy in 1897. The painting was exhibited there in 1899, its title taken from Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It”, Act III, Scene IV, Corin to Celia: “If you will see a pageant truly play’d, Between the pale complexion of true love, And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain, Go hence a little….”
3. A colour-print of the picture “Chance” appeared in the April 1901 edition of The Studio. Writing at length in the July 1901 issue, Walter Shaw Sparrow (1862-1940) focused on this watercolour in his chiding critique of Eleanor’s competence.
4. “A Knight and Cupid before a Castle Door”. 1900. The cupid in this watercolour, startlingly adorned with crimson wings, is the keeper of the keys. Perhaps the knight is taking note of the scattered coins and bones about the castle steps, wondering if the same macabre fate awaits him within.
5. “Time the Physician.” One of Eleanor’s first oil paintings, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1900.
6. “In the Springtime”. The shimmering silken folds of the woman’s dress amidst a pale carpet of bluebells lend a lightness to this painting which was apparently included in one of the exhibitions at Messrs Dowdeswell’s galleries in London, from 1901.
7. “The Deceitfulness of Riches”. 1901. The quote used in The Times for Eleanor’s obituary was the concluding sentence of an extended comment by Percy Bate (1868-1913) in “The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, their Associates and Successors”, published in 1910, not quite a decade after the painting was first exhibited: “Noteworthy work is at present being done on the most rigid Pre-Raphaelite principles by Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, who, in such pictures as “The Deceitfulness of Riches”, achieves a notable success in a most ambitious style.” The painting was reproduced in black & white, its richness rather lost in comparison with the vividly colourful original.
8. “Today For Me”. Another painting from 1901, which appeared (again as a black & white reproduction) in Walter Shaw Sparrow’s “Women Painters of the World, from Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day.” (Hodder and Stoughton, The Art and Life Library. 1905.) One of several works by Eleanor illustrating Chapter III, “Modern British Women Painters” by Ralph Peacock (1868-1946). The caption noted that the original watercolour was “in the collection of Miss Evans”.
In September 1888 Charles Fortescue-Brickdale had married Mabel Beatrice Gibbs, whose brother Joseph Arthur was an acclaimed cricketer of his generation. Having moved to a manor house near Cirencester in 1892, Joseph had also become an author of several books. Still in print today, A Cotswold Village, or country life and pursuits in Gloucestershire, contained a note in the preface, dated September 1898: “I am indebted to Miss E. F. Brickdale for the pen-and-ink sketches…” (The title page of the book simply says “With Illustrations”; the book also includes photographs.)
Gibbs himself was to die suddenly, at the age of only 31, the following year. The words and drawings evoke the genteel pursuits and drowsy summer days of rural life in late-Victorian England. The illustrations are competent and unremarkable - unless you remember that they are done by a young art student - and as yet offer no significant indication of the wealth of gorgeous imagery that was to come, when Eleanor turned her hand to more illustrious texts. The following year, she illustrated Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; ten line drawings done for a modest edition published by George Bell & Sons, London. The drawings are signed E F-BRICKDALE and are dated 1899.
At about the same time as Eleanor made her entry into the world of book illustration, she had already tried her hand at the popular art of the bookplate. This was an area that was broadening beyond the traditionally armorial designs of the past, to encompass more imaginative motifs. A number of well-known artists had already produced attractive work in this field. Illustrious names in the world of late-Victorian art such as Charles Robinson, Robert Anning Bell, John Byam Liston Shaw ~ even Aubrey Beardsley and the Belgian Fernand Khnopff ~ had already graced the libraries or more modest collections of the cultured classes.
In a Special Winter Number of The Studio issued for 1898-99, the magazine’s co- founder Gleeson White (1851-1898) wrote a feature on “Modern Book-Plates and Their Designers”. In the section on British Book-Plates, Eleanor secured the following commendation: “Miss E. F. Brickdale, a young illustrator of conspicuous promise, shows in the designs for Charles Fortescue Brickdale, Grace Elizabeth Gladstone, and Ada Mary Devenish Walrond, not merely pleasant fancy, but distinct effort to break away from the formal rectangular shape, so long deemed essential. The rather gruesome device on the last named, with its mysterious motto, seems unduly sombre, although book-plates are the happy hunting ground of grisly skeletons. But the merits of these designs far outweigh their shortcomings, and it is evident that Miss Brickdale is likely to become as popular in this field of design as in others where already she has scored notable successes.” The mention was only marred by the apparent exclusion of the “gruesome device”, left tantalisingly open to the reader’s curiosity, as the rather more conventional design for the Ex-Libris belonging to Eleanor’s brother Charles seems to have been the only one included by Mr White to illustrate examples of her work.
Eleanor exhibited her work at the Royal Academy from 1899 onwards, an oil painting every year until 1908, and with diminishing frequency after that date, until her last contribution in 1932. In 1899, Charles and Walter Dowdeswell commissioned Eleanor to produce a series of watercolours in view of an exhibition. She delivered 45 paintings over the following two years, which were exhibited at the fashionable Dowdeswell Galleries in New Bond Street in 1901. The show, entitled “Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of”, was apparently greeted by mixed reviews, not in least for the erroneous quote from Shakespeare. (The catalogue made no mention that E. Fortescue-Brickdale was a woman, and a young woman of 29 at that.) Despite the dubious critics, the exhibition was a frank success: all but two of the watercolours were sold.
By 1902 she had acquired a studio in Holland Park Road, opposite Leighton House, where she exhibited in March of that year. This address was to be her base for the remainder of her artistic career. (The building was damaged by bombing during WW II.) The same year, she was admitted as the first female member of the Institute of Painters in Oils and continued to exhibit regularly. Parallel to this, she pursued a career in book illustration and periodicals. She also designed items for Liberty & Co. A ”Studio Talk” article in The Studio, September 1904, makes mention of her designs and enamels.7
Paintings by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
1. “The Ugly Princess.” This picture, dated c. 1902, was seemingly inspired by a short and sorrowful poem with the same title by Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), about a woman rejected who then unwillingly became a nun. The last two lines of verse: “I was not good enough for man, And so am given to God” were apparently quoted in the exhibition catalogue at the time.
2. “The Poet”. An unusual watercolour dated 1903, where the subdued colours that define the travelling medieval minstrel and the maiden who opens the door to admit him, are unexpectedly offset by her possession of a finely draped pair of wings.
3. ”They Toil Not, Neither Do They Spin”, also from 1903, would appear to be Eleanor’s observation on an excerpt from The Gospels: Matthew, Chapter VI, verses 24-33: “And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.” The complacent-looking lady in the foreground seems more absorbed in her own artificial finery than in the rose whose perfume she carelessly contemplates, in contrast with the drably-dressed servant in the background.
4. “Love and his Counterfeits”. This painting from 1905 was included in Eleanor’s second exhibition at Messrs Dowdeswell’s in June of that year. It is said to illustrate the following text, written - perhaps by the artist herself - on the back of the picture:
“Love and his Counterfeits. When a girl’s soul awakens and she opens the door of her Heart’s Castle to receive Love, at first she will not recognise him. First, she will see Fear and think him to be Love. Fear, in craven armour of black, with no coat of arms or badge to mark his family. But by Fear, Love may come. Then she will see Romance, being now in love with ‘being in love’ - Romance, the Boy on a Bubble with a Castle of Dreams in his hand, and Birds and Roses about him. He leads Ambition, who shall stir the girl to think he is Love himself - Ambition, very hot and eager, riding upon Pegasus, the winged Horse. After them is Position, whom she may take for Love; but truly she is in love with Appearance, Prestige, Importance, Riches, Place, all his Train, and this is borne by a Cupid. Now she is stirred by Pity, thinking whom she pities she loves - Pity with the Cup of tears with three handles, that many may drink. Then she perceives Arts, a brave fellow who is but words and emptiness and a mask for love. Arts paints a wound upon him and sings that it is real. To Love he is not henchman, nor cousin, but enemy. Behind him goes Flattery with a mirror, so she is wooed by vain words. Then Gratitude comes with the smoke of memory, and she will think she is faithless if she does not love one who has been kind. Now, at last, after her emotion, her assault by gifts, mirrors, riches, tears, dreams, phrases, memories, comes True Love, empty-handed, to take and win her Heart’s Castle.”
While it is tempting to read an amorous deception of Eleanor’s own into the choice of subject, nothing permits the viewer to surmise that it is anything other than a carefully planned allegory.
5. “The Lover’s World”. 1905. The picture was described as follows in the catalogue for the 1989 exhibition “The Last Romantics” at the Barbican Art Gallery in London: “A charming work from the second of the three exhibitions which the artist held at the Dowdeswell Galleries, 160 New Bond Street, before the First World War….”
6. “The Little Foot-Page”. This painting was shown in 1905 at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. It illustrates a memorable scene from the Scottish ballad of “Burd Helen”, where the heroine is cutting her costume and hair, to disguise herself and her pregnancy and follow her seemingly cold-hearted lover on foot as he travels on horseback. Eleanor must have been familiar with “Percy’s Reliques”, an eighteenth-century collection of old poems and ballads, which apparently included this popular folk-song. The chapter dedicated to Percy’s work in “The Cambridge History of English & American Literature in Eighteen Volumes”. (1907-21). “The Age of Johnson” (Vol. X), commented that: “Percy’s ‘Reliques’ were much more closely related to the Middle Ages than Ossian was; they revealed the proper medieval treasures of romance and ballad poetry.”
7. “The Uninvited Guest”. Dated 1906, Eleanor appeared to be making a mordant remark on a marriage contracted for reasons of wealth and status, rather than Love who bound and flightless, looks on powerlessly. The lavish procession - the bride resplendent in her gorgeous gown - contrasts strikingly with the simplicity of the semi-naked figure of the title. Eleanor’s earliest paintings onward were frequently notable for their moralistic tones and titles, presumably reflecting the strong spiritual principles that were apparently so important a part of her life.
In 1905, she contributed seventy black and white illustrations to an edition of Tennyson’s Poems published by George Bell and Sons. Another exhibition was held at the Dowdeswell Gallery, with the same title “Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of” in June, once again to mixed reviews. Her painting “The Little Foot-Page” was exhibited the same year at the Royal Academy, and in 1906, she presented “The Uninvited Guest”. The former, which captures a poignant scene from the Scottish ballad of “Burd Helen”, further displayed her aptitude for portraying nature with exceptional precision and delicacy, no doubt drawn from her contemplations of tangled stem and trailing foliage in the verdant hedgerows and woodlands of Gloucestershire. Also from 1905 is “The Lover’s World”, one of her few specifically fairy subjects, very much in the spirit of the Edwardian era. (Peter Pan was first produced the year before.) In 1906, Methuen published A Child’s Life of Christ (the first of seven editions), with eight watercolours.
In 1909 she contributed ten colour plates to Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them, by Horace J. & Walter P. Wright. (She was one of ten artists commissioned to provide ten illustrations each.) Her own depictions stand out in the simplicity and beauty of their botanical accuracy, as well as their stylish presentation on the page. She had, in fact, already been remarked on and recognised for her competence in this artistic category, as early as 1902, when an “exquisitely realistic…study of a rose bush” was reproduced in Volume 26 of The Studio in August of that year.
Paintings by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
1. “Youth and the Lady”. From 1900, this painting seems a wry early comment by Eleanor on vain hope and female vanity. At the age of twenty-nine, she must have already believed that the ephemeral first flush of beauty was not enough. This was the only coloured illustration featured alongside several of her works reproduced in black & white for Chapter III, “Modern British Women Painters” by Ralph Peacock, in Walter Shaw Sparrow’s study of “Women Painters of the World”, already noted from 1905.
2. “Romance”. Whilst a winged lute player serenades a fair lady and her lover seated on a lawn, close beside them sits a wistful cherub contemplating a fairy ring. A kneeling knight unfurls his gleaming banner, but silent and almost concealed in the background, a solitary figure in somber garb looks on.
3. “Spring and Autumn”. The apple-cheeked cupid who symbolizes the bright beginnings of Spring is embraced by a mellow and bountiful Autumn, amidst a harvest of ripe fruit. The fresh clusters of leaves give way to those withered and fallen about her feet. The painting here is apparently set in its original mount.
4. “The Blush”. This portrait, with a cupid’s wing casting delicate rosy tints across the girl’s complexion, uses the feathers as a frame for her face. The overall delicacy of the design is continued in the daisy chain, the dainty lace of the girl’s dress, and the flowers and tiny figures woven into her cascade of golden curls.
5. “Time and Immortality”. Details are elusive for this watercolour, which was apparently first exhibited in 1905, possibly part of Eleanor’s second show at the Dowdeswell Gallery. The winged figures of the title provide a framework for the scene; somber “Time” appears to be lowering the tableau’s disturbingly sightless Everyman into a roughly-hewn grave, whilst luminous “Immortality” attempts to raise him up. Two unearthly visions appearing with poignant clarity at the moment of passing.
6. “An Introduction”. Christopher Wood, in his book “Fairies in Victorian Art” describes this painting thus: “Deep in a wood, a young girl…in medieval -looking dress, encounters three gnomes. The senior gnome is introducing one of his companions, who bows deeply, removing his hat. The scene is set in a brilliant Pre-Raphaelite style landscape and observed with remarkable fidelity.” This was one of the illustrations chosen for a chapter entitled “Lesser Fairy Painters”, alongside “The Lover’s World” of 1905.
7. “Petrarch’s Laura at Avignon”. Eleanor painted this portrait of Laura, the lifelong love of the Tuscan poet Petrarch, as she might have looked when he first saw her in the Church of St Clare (at Avignon) in April 1327. Although Eleanor pictured her as a young woman in round and rosy-cheeked health, it is however likely that Laura’s later demise in April 1348 may have been grimly linked to the Black Death. It is debatable whether the jewel-bright anemones at her breast were a deliberate choice on the part of the artist, for in the Victorian language of flowers these signified “forsaken”.
8. “Lady Macbeth”. In 1901 Eleanor’s illustration of this subject for the Archibald Constable editions of Shakespeare was greatly admired. The sketch shown here appeared to be a gift, signed and dated March 10th 1908.
9. “Mary For All Generations”, or “All Generations Shall Call Me Blessed” as Eleanor herself referred to the painting in a letter dated February 1929 to her brother Jack (exhibited as part of the 1972 Ashmolean Museum retrospective of her work, in Oxford). Essentially practical, she wrote: “...a great many of my dearest friends have been sitting for the heads in it, which saves me a lot [of money].” The title is taken from The Magnificat (English Book of Common Prayer version), and the completed painting was apparently presented to St George’s church in Kensington.
10. “Interior, Milan Cathedral”. This was apparently painted between 1910-1930, illustrative of the times Eleanor spent travelling in Europe.
11. “The Guardian Angel”. In 1910 Eleanor executed the original painting as a memorial for her friend, the aviation pioneer Charles Rolls (b. 1877), who had died in an accident during a flying display near Bournemouth in July of that year. He is represented in the predella, between Leonardo da Vinci (the “forerunner” whose designs depicted the early dreams of human flight, and whom Eleanor would later portray in 1920) and the doomed Icarus. In a heavy gold frame, the painting stands at the foot of the stairs in the historical and imposing Avington Park, Hampshire, once the home of Rolls’ sister and her husband. The “Overseas Club” magazine dated June 1919 carried the following advertisement for The Medici Society (Christmas Cards & Calendars): “Eleanor F. Brickdale’s new picture – “The Guardian Angel” [an allegory of the Airforce]. Uniform in size and character with her latest published work, and as fine in colour as in conception. Colour-surface 15 by 8 inches. Mounted prints 7s. 6d each: 300 Artist’s Copies (signed), £1 1s. each.”
Eleanor was fortunate in her country connections, making frequent visits to friends and acquaintances outside London, notably in Lancashire, Shropshire and Gloucestershire. She also was a regular guest at her brother’s house in Newland in the Forest of Dean. Eleanor also travelled widely, principally to the south of France and to Italy, sketching and painting as she went.
She provided ten watercolours for each of two separate volumes of Browning’s poems: Pippa Passes & Men and Women and Dramatis Personae and Dramatic Romances & Lyrics, published by Chatto & Windus in 1908 and 1909 respectively. In June 1909, the Dowdeswell Gallery held the third exhibition of Eleanor’s work: “Poems of Robert Browning, etc.” In the same year, the Leicester Galleries commissioned Eleanor to provide twenty-eight watercolours on the theme of Tennyson’s Idylls, which she delivered in regular batches of four at the fixed fee of 15 guineas each over the next two years. These were published in 1911 by Hodder & Stoughton in two editions: a deluxe version with 21 colour plates for 2 guineas, and a popular edition with 12 plates, which sold for 15 shillings. These paintings, along with others – 37 in total, were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London, in the same year.
Paintings by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
1. “Head of a Tudor Girl” This oil painting was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, in London. The heraldic devices and exquisite costume detail, especially the gable headdress, reveal Eleanor’s exceptionally careful study of period components in her paintings. The possible significance of the single flower could arise from the apparent belief that pink carnations sprang from the Virgin Mary’s tears. Although consequently associated with a mother’s love, they can also be seen as a symbol of innocence and purity.
2. “The Forerunner”. Subtitled “Leonardo da Vinci showing a model of his flying machine to Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and his Court”. Although Eleanor was revisiting an apparent interest in aeronautics on wooden or metal wings already seen in her 1910 portrait of “The Guardian Angel”, it is intriguing that she, for all her medieval subject-matter and the harking back to times past, had actually painted a modern picture with a theme of very new-at-the-time technology (in commemoration of the early aviator Charles Rolls), then reiterated it in an unusual way further on in this work, dated 1920, by giving the theme back to Leonardo. Her tribute to two pioneers, separated by centuries. The “Renaissance Man’s” farsighted fascination with flight is beautifully depicted here in rich historical detail, recognizable in the rendering of other authentic figures of antiquity in the frame.
3. “L’Arrivée des Filles du Roi”. Variously called “The King’s Daughters” or “The Arrival of the Brides” and dated some time before 1927, this was Eleanor’s interpretation of a period in Canada’s history, between 1663-73, when about 800 women sailed to “New France” as part of plans to settle the colonies there. Within this exodus a group of women were specifically selected for the voyage and the king of France himself, Louis XIV, paid for their passage. The scene depicted here is the arrival (dated 1667) of the ladies in Quebec, to be married to French-Canadian farmers. The local dignitaries are observed gallantly greeting these women, the prospective wives (their would-be bridegrooms are not in the picture), although despite the fine clothes it is all rather reminiscent of their future consorts paying a visit to a cattle market. Perhaps the strong-minded (and unmarried) Eleanor was making a comment of her own, through the conveyance of chronicled facts.
4. “The Wise and Foolish Virgins”. With a possible date of 1930, this painting depicts a well-known parable taken from the Gospel of St Matthew, chapter XXV, lines 1-9, in which Jesus warns that all should be prepared for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. Eleanor has removed the virgins from their strict medieval formalism and placed them on a swirling stone staircase, creating a true Pre-Raphaelite interpretation of the parable.
5. “My Rose, I Gather for the Breast of God”. This was part of an exhibition at the aforementioned Dowdeswell Galleries in June 1909 of twenty watercolours executed by Eleanor for the poems of Robert Browning. The catalogue pointed out that this painting was not in fact included in the illustrations Eleanor had recently completed for the books: “Pippa Passes and Men & Women” (published in 1908), and “Dramatis Personae and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics” (1909). Its title is taken from a line in Browning’s narrative poem “The Ring and the Book”, first published in 1868.
6. “Chivalry Dying of Love for the Goddesses”. In a procession led by peacocks, proud Juno walks before a war-like Minerva, gentle Venus, and abundant Ceres with sickle and a sheaf of corn, beside her ill-fated daughter Proserpina. Fair Flora follows, wild Diana the Huntress, Iris of the rainbow bridge, and hindmost, Hebe. Bearing in mind Eleanor’s preference for allegorical painting, the presence of these deities and the dead or dying knights has been interpreted here as symbolic of patriotism and sacrifice, so the moribund figures in the ditch could then plausibly be transplanted to the trenches of the First World War. This work is in the collection at Clevedon Court, North Somerset, an area that Eleanor appears to have known well, and where a number of her stained glass windows remain in several local churches.
7. “Prospero and Ariel”. This chalk illustration was apparently for an early twentieth-century edition of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, although it is unclear whether Eleanor may have completed it as a further contribution to the Archibald Constable publications of 1901. Perhaps she chose to represent the learned Prospero’s guardian spirit from part of Ariel’s speech in Act I, Scene II: “…be’t to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl’d clouds….”
8. “The Chatelaine”. The Studio edition of December 1904 included this review of a piece by Eleanor: STUDIO-TALK (From our Own Correspondents). LONDON.–“The statuette called The Chatelaine, by Miss Eleanor Fortescue -Brickdale, here illustrated, is on view at the Leicester Galleries. Made of coloured plaster, it realises a romantic and reminiscent mood, as of some figure that has moved through Scott’s novels, the lady of some castle, or the guardian, perhaps, of an imprisoned queen. The gold pattern worked upon the dress is carried out with consider-able boldness, but remains subordinate to the general rich scheme of colour that emphasises the careful modelling and arrangement of the drapery.”
Eleanor was to exhibit this work many years later at the Royal Academy, in 1939.
It was a busy year for Eleanor, who also began teaching classes at the Byam Shaw School of Art, founded by the artists John Byam Shaw and Rex Vicat Cole in 1910. An article entitled “Where to Study Art”, one of a series by the prolific Gladys Beattie Crozier in Every Woman’s Encyclopedia (London, 1910-1912) has this to say of the new institution: “A new Art School and its Ideals - Individuality and Originality Carefully Fostered by Teaching Methods. This is the newest of the London Art Schools of importance, for it was opened in May 1910, in a specially designed and splendidly fitted building, containing a set of fine studios, at 70, Campden Street, Campden Hill… It has already become a highly flourishing school, with an attendance of over forty students, and the chance visitor to the school is struck by the youthful spirit of energy and artistic enterprise which animates students and teachers alike…
To the girl art student a peculiar attraction in the teaching lies in the fact that the chief object in the course of training is to stimulate the young artist’s own originality, and by constant change of work and of models, to avoid any possibility of staleness or monotony in the daily round of work in the studios.
…In the still life and lay figure costume painting studio there is a most interesting case hung against the wall, which displays a number of dolls wearing the garb of mediaeval times. The knight, the page, the chatelaine, the serving-maid, and, last but not least, the fool are all represented. Their dresses, having been copied from prints and pictures of the day, are correct in every detail. This collection furnishes a valuable means of reference for students engaged either in planning out a set of illustrations to some romantic story whose period is set in olden days, or in composing some important picture.”
A progressive school that welcomed and encouraged female students must have enchanted Eleanor. While little survives of her life at the school, she was still teaching composition there in 1922.
Left: Advertisement for the Byam Shaw and Vicat Cole Art School, Studio International, Volume 83, January-June 1922. The school logo was designed by Eleanor.
Centre: “A new Art School and its Ideals - Individuality and Originality Carefully Fostered by Teaching Methods” by Gladys Beattie Crozier, “Every Woman’s Encyclopedia”, London, 1910-1912
Right: Frieze featuring the founding members of the school
About the same time, Hodder & Stoughton published Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s Golden Book of Songs & Ballads, a clear statement that her illustrations were the focus of the book. The following year, Herbert and Daniel commissioned eight watercolour illustrations for an edition of William Canton’s The Story of St Elizabeth of Hungary. She provided eight watercolours for The Gathering of Brother Hilarius by Michael Fairless in 1913. In 1915, Hodder & Stoughton published twenty-four full-colour plates of Eleanor’s watercolours in Old English Songs & Ballads, a book which includes some of her most striking illustrations, notably the troubling “Knight and Child”, and signals, in itself, the end of an era. (These and others were shown at the Leicester Gallery in October of the same year.) The Story of Saint Christopher & Saint Cuthbert by Mary MacGregor, published by T. C. & E. C. Jack, also appeared in 1915.
With the onset of the First World War Eleanor designed posters for the Ministry of Information and the Child Welfare Association. (Like many artists after the War she received commissions for memorials; her memorial to the 6th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, commissioned in 1919, was unveiled in York Minster in 1921.) Despite the strictures the war imposed on publishing, Hodder & Stoughton remained faithful to their artist and in 1919, she produced eight colour illustrations for Palgrave’s Golden Book of Songs and Lyrics, followed by Eleanor Brickdale’s Golden Book of Famous Women, also in 1919 (or possibly 1920), proof that her name was still an attractive sales argument. The originals, plus a small handful of others, comprised her third exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in April of the same year, the year she was also elected R. W. S. Her work appeared, along with other artists, notably Willy Pogány, in Stories of the Saints in 1921.
Eleanor changed her style completely, adopting a simple outline and flat colours, most probably to accommodate the printing of texts and illustrations on the same page, to illustrate Fleur & Blanchefleur in 1922, a style she pursued for the vignettes of Carols in 1925, while equally painting elaborate watercolours for tipped-in plates. 1926 saw the publication of The Diary of an Eighteenth-Century Garden and 1927 The Gentle Art, both with only one colour plate and a number of line drawings. Poor health and fading sight put an end to her career as an illustrator, though she continued to paint and produce designs for stained glass. Her “Ariel and Prospero” was unveiled in the Board Room of the BBC’s Broadcasting House in 1931.
In the later years of her life Eleanor was clearly still spending a significant amount of time in the country. Charles Fortescue-Brickdale, who so evidently shared his sister’s love of art and all things medieval, recorded (in papers written for the Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society during 1933 -34) the reredos she had painted in memory of their mother in “The Cathedral of the Forest”, Newland Church. Further south in the village of Chew Magna, North Somerset, Eleanor designed a magnificent stained glass window in 1934 for the Strachey Chapel, featuring the figures of St George and St Elizabeth of Hungary. Her designer’s mark was an “E”, an “F”, with the initial for “Brickdale” replaced by the emblem of a bee. She designed more than 20 stained glass windows between 1914 and 1940.
As for her association with the Stracheys, they were a family long established in the district. John St Loe Strachey (1860-1927) was the editor of The Spectator and appeared to have later connections with The Cornhill magazine. In his book The Adventure of Living. A subjective autobiography 1860-1922, published in 1923, he described the family seat, Sutton Court, as standing “beside its sheltering elms and limes, with its terraces looking to the blue line of the Mendip, its battlemented and flower-tufted fortress wall, and its knightly Tower built for security and defence.” With her own vivid imagination and late Pre-Raphaelite love of richly detailed medieval imagery, it is tempting to envisage Eleanor as a fairly regular visitor to this particular Englishman’s “castle”, where, if this was the case, she must surely have found many sources of pictorial and painterly inspiration.
Eleanor’s stained glass signature
Her last exhibited work at the Royal Academy in 1939 was a coloured plaster statuette entitled “The Chatelaine”, modeled thirty years earlier. She suffered a stroke in 1938, thereafter producing little work until her death in March 1945, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, London. The RWS held a memorial show of her paintings later that year. A retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Ashmolean Museum in 1972.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale in her studio.
Time and time again, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale seems to inconvenience the critics of the period. In the words of the eminent Walter Shaw Sparrow:
“Again and again, in the art practice of true women, technical defects must be pardoned, not reluctantly, but with as much readiness as we excuse the errors of archaeology in the plays of Shakespeare. As an example of this in the work by Miss Fortescue-Brickdale, let me remind you of the colour-print representing a picture entitled Chance, a page of sunlight that appeared in The Studio for April. The oversight to be forgiven in this water-colour is the face that peers out from the background, just behind the raised hand of the principal figure. The composition would be much improved if that face were hidden by the leafed, tapestry-like background; and yet one is willing to be annoyed by it for the sake of the notable good qualities, like the exquisite handling of the flowing red robe, the subtle and beautiful colour, the gentle seriousness and sincerity of the general treatment, and the delicate spirit of high comedy, so fresh and yet so scenic in lightness, that gives so much charm to the pretty girl in the act of questioning Chance, as youngsters do it in the fields.”8
Sparrow chides Brickdale on her judgment, making a point of underlining her marred composition which places a face near Chance’s upraised hand, rather than a conveniently neutral swatch of hedge, ascribing it to awkwardness and inattention. He is missing the point completely. Medieval paintings abound in “awkward” juxtapositions, bits and pieces of a background figure or element peeking around foreground figures. The medieval hierarchy of rank largely subverted that of space, and this is just the hierarchy that Brickdale is depicting. To one accustomed to the language of such imagery, who would have no more trouble with the juxtaposition than distinguishing conventional narrative tricks, the two planes are distinct, though they may jostle and try the sensibilities of the modern eye. In this sense, (and perhaps Brickdale is indulging in the discretely perverse pleasure of testing the dos and don’ts of the art establishment) she anchors her pictorial values ever more firmly in an age far removed from contemporary taste, despite the refurbishing of the medieval (and the re-invention of Olde England) by Pugin and his followers. She demonstrates this facility to usurp the rules of academic spatial depiction in the wings of her imagery, never as a focus of her painting. The beautiful knight and child, done as an illustration for Old English Songs and Ballads, is the most striking demonstration of her easy disregard for convention. The landscape is so close as to appear almost as a painted backdrop, foreshortened and flattened as if by a telephoto lens, or a 14th-century painting. This willful bending of the “rules” is characteristic of Eleanor’s approach. Rather than compare the work of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale to that of her male contemporaries, it would be far more just to admit to an individual with a strong personality and a deft hand who followed her own inclinations.
But, ultimately, one is willing to be annoyed by Sparrow, because for his sake he means well, despite letting the times speak through him in referring to the “technical defects” of the “art practice of true women” – perhaps he means those who are academically weak, barred as they were from studying anatomy. But then, this was a time that considered more “primitive” races as infantile, placing them in the role of children in relation to adult (read “white European”) societies. He is simply unable to free himself from the rigid conventionalities of the time, and he should be forgiven the guilty pleasure of thinking he has found a weakness to remonstrate with a patronizing pat on the back.
Article on Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale in The Studio, 1901
“Solidity” is an apt term to qualify Eleanor’s work. Her draftsmanship is flawless, her grasp of space and perspective mathematical, her sense of colour spatiality irreproachable, her figures consummately academic; all in all, she is a little daunting to those who are seeking a reassuring “femininity” (read “easily identifiable academic failings”) in her work, reason for Sparrow to have pounced with such glee on any real or perceived awkwardness. She displays none of the hectic fervor often associated with the genre, and so appealing to a modern audience, so intimately do we associate tragedy with Pre-Raphaelitism.
Moreover, Brickdale eschews the historical reinvention of the “medievalisers” of the day, who reveled in flowing robes, wild locks and amour à la Burne-Jones, a heady mélange of neoclassicism and medievalism as beautiful as it is historically inaccurate. She situates her own Middle Ages at the very end, for her, Tennyson’s Arthur lives in the world of William Caxton’s new press, the waning of the Middle Ages of the late 15th century. Eleanor’s historical knowledge is evidenced by every wimple and chaperon, every snug doublet and hose. It is a fashion-conscious and restrained world, one with which we are wholly unfamiliar outside the art of the era itself. No other turn-of-the-century artists, with the exception of the Pre-Raphaelites, who did reach deeply into the period, but more often to Italy than Burgundy and Flanders, made a like choice. Thus. Eleanor’s work is as difficult to “read” as the art of the period itself, subtly straight-laced and constrained, a little distant, with less of the atmosphere so appealing in Pre-Raphaelite painting. The result: “…highly detailed and meaningful little pictures …crammed with medievalism and moral sentiment.”9 An unfair judgment at best, and an unjust condemnation and dismissal of her work.
As a critic of the time judiciously and not unkindly summed up in “Bookshelf” from the pages of The Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors, in January 1915 (though he cannot refrain from a pique or two in passing):
“The pen of Tennyson, deeply tinged with romantic feeling, offers many opportunities for the brush of the genre painter, who falls too frequently into an error of representing the characters of the poems as belonging to some definite period, rather than to a semi-imaginative epoch, such as Doré was wont to create. While it is desirable to be as correct as possible when illustrating a work like the “Idylls of the King”, nevertheless we must bear in mind that, strictly speaking, the habitués of Arthur’s court would have been actually very different to the polished and debonnaire warriors portrayed by Tennyson. In this respect Miss Fortescue Brickdale has followed closely in the footsteps of her author, and shows us scenes from fifteenth-century life rendered in a manner reminiscent of the old missal painters and the late Mr Edwin Abbey, R. A., with the result that her illustrations in colour appear somewhat unconvincing. The most successful, undoubtedly, is the clever study of the weeping Guinevere in nun’s garb, pausing under a picturesque cloister beyond which shine the bright-hued colours of the garth. A keen archaeologist might possibly say that Miss Brickdale’s knowledge of armour is sometimes at fault, but this does not preclude the edition from being a tasteful one, which should be appreciated.”
Being summarily dismissed is a danger courted in many works. Gordon N. Ray, in The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914 (Oxford University Press, 1976) states: “The artist must have been consciously archaizing in these designs, many of which seem to derive from the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations of the Moxon Tennyson or the drawings of M. J. Lawless. But the borders remind the reader that Art Nouveau has intervened.” Not only is Lawless’ work in every way less remarkable, the borders likely owe more to a printer’s apprentice than to the defining turn-of-the-century movement. The contrast is striking with Eleanor’s chapter in Illustrating Camelot, by Barbara Tepa Lupack and Alan Lupack, (D.S.Brewer, 2008), which provides a deeply considered appraisal of the same work.
But, there are wider issues in an unbiased appreciation of Brickdale’s art. It is naturally assumed that any female artist who frequents a male artist is inevitably influenced by his work. Eleanor’s work is often considered to be inspired by the paintings of John Byam Liston Shaw. Upon looking closely, the relationship is not at all in evidence; in fact it would be as easy to pretend to her influence on Shaw’s illustrations. She did clearly admire his work, witness her comments on “The Queen of Hearts”, in 1896, “the first picture in which he sprang suddenly out in his own extraordinarily brilliant and original style” and “Love’s Baubles” three years later: “No one can describe how fresh and delightful it looked at the Academy. Most of the subject pictures at that time were a bit dreary, generally very ‘aesthetic’ or ‘arty’, and hardly any one of them seemed to be sincere. The picture is painted in an inexperienced manner, for he was still very young (twenty-five), but the drawing is fine and the colour full of joy and fearlessness”.10 Otherwise, we know little of their relationship. While Byam Shaw’s paintings are intricate and studied and often haunting and disturbingly beautiful, his illustration work can vary from the carefully executed to the hurried and often approximate, with unremarkable compositions and pen work that appears rushed. Both illustrated Tennyson, Eleanor’s drawings are by far the better work of the two. She clearly took her book commissions more seriously.
They do, however, show a community of spirit and shared love of medieval art. It is hard to imagine a woman of Eleanor’s determination and independent spirit being influenced graphically; it is more plausible to imagine a mutual emulation and respect, rather than simply writing off the work of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale as an adequate copy of Byam Shaw. (And, “keen archaeologists” notwithstanding, her knowledge of period armour is excellent.)
Eleanor was considered unorthodox by some for her refusal to give up her artistic pretensions and find a decent husband to provide for her. (Byam Shaw’s wife, Evelyn, gave up a promising career to raise a family, although she did become a teacher at her husband’s school.) The relentless comparison of Eleanor to her male contemporaries, especially to Byam Shaw, is an ill-disguised attempt to submerge her name and subsume her creative spirit, as she was unwilling to do so herself.
Eleanor was given to traveling in southern Europe, trips on which she painted and drew. The qualifier “like Ruskin” more often than not accompanies mentions of these trips. This is a curious addendum, as she apparently did not keep extensive diaries and publish books of her travels (like Ruskin) nor did she protest all the while that she could not really paint (like Ruskin). It is a grand shame, though, that she did not keep a diary, but this is a familiar regret concerning those who left primarily images, and not words.
Line illustrations by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale
1. “Sir Lancelot du Lake”, 1897 illustration for “an old ballad” from Thomas Percy’s (1729-1811), “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” first published in 1765.
2. “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” (which apparently, according to one critic*, “every black and white artist is doomed to attempt sooner or later.”), from the poem “Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil” (published in 1820) by John Keats (1795-1821).
3. “Iseult of Brittany” from an original crayon drawing reproduced in “Women Painters of the World, from the time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day” by Walter Shaw Sparrow (1862-1940). Hodder and Stoughton, The Art and Life Library. 1905. Taken from Chapter III, “Modern British Women Painters”, contributed by Ralph Peacock. It is possible that Eleanor’s inspiration for this could have been part III of the narrative poem “Tristram and Iseult” by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888).
4. Bookplate design for Charles Fortescue-Brickdale, reproduced in “Modern Book-plates and their Designers: British Bookplates”, by Gleeson White (1851-1898), a Special Winter Number of The Studio, 1898-99.
5. “The Princess and the Swineherd”, from the fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), reproduced, as were illustration numbers 1 and 2*, in an article by “E. B. S” in The Studio of March 1898. Eleanor began to exhibit some of these drawings in the black-and-white section at the Royal Academy, whilst still a student there.
6. “Two clever illustrations to an old ballad”. “The Twa Sisters o’ Binnorie”, a tale from the seventeenth century, were featured as part of a short reference to Eleanor’s work in the “Studio Talk” section of The Studio International, Volume 21, dated November 1900. The writer made the following observation: “…As an artist in pen and ink, Miss Brickdale is already known to readers of The Studio. Her work in this medium still has a good deal to gain both in variety of tone and suppleness of line, but it is touched with dramatic feeling, and is thoughtful, strong and distinguished….”
7. Ibid.
8. “Love and Adversity”, from a watercolour drawing dated 1900, reproduced in Walter Shaw Sparrow’s article “On Some Watercolours by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale” in The Studio of July 1901.
9. Eleanor exhibited “Botticelli’s Studio” at the Royal Academy in 1922. One can only suppose how sumptuous the colours must have been, because so many works of art, both classical and contemporary, were still frequently reproduced in black & white, as this one was in “The Royal Academy Illustrated” for that same year.
10. From “The Story of St Christopher” by Mary MacGregor, published in London by T. C. & E. C. Jack. 1915.
11. A Land Certificate cover designed by Eleanor. Her brother Charles Fortescue-Brickdale (1857-1944) became a highly successful Chief Registrar of Land Registry in 1900, holding the post until 1923.
Another critic takes to task her line drawing “The Princess and the Swineherd”, focusing on the pigs (too small) and the male figure’s arm (too short), while in the same breath offering patronizing compliments.
“… a few details would need modification, notably in the scale of the animals in the foreground. This trick of reducing the scale of her quadrupeds may be seen in the charming group of Hans Andersen’s Princess and the Swineherd, which we reproduce. It has no doubt been done of set purpose, but “piggies” the size of white rats require a good deal of ingenious defence when the average man in the streets raises his not unsupported objections.
Be that as it may, Miss Brickdale displays in this same drawing so much vigour, and such an admirable power of telling a story, that it would be easy to forgive her the “five little pigs” for the sake of the rest. The swineherd himself, kissing the princess with almost brutal force, is drawn (despite somewhat doubtful details of his left arm) with an enormous amount of vitality; indeed it would not be easy to find a passage in current literature which tells the story so well. He is no lay figure, no stage tenor, but an old world lover whose passion is by no means reciprocated by the greedy little princess grudgingly paying her toll of one hundred kisses for the magic pipkin with bells around the rim, bells that jingle Lieber Augustin when the water boils. Miss Brickdale may possibly have seen Mr. Byam Shaw’s delightful picture of the same subject – certain details of the costume suggest his influence; but all the same she has not given us a paraphrase of his idea, but a very adequate and delightful interpretation of the story that witches one in middle age as fully as it did in the nursery. Technically speaking, one feels that less attempt to model the flesh would be better, the convention of black and white is apt to suggest “dirty” rather than rose-red faces when too many lines are used for the cheeks and the neck. These criticisms, whether well- or ill-founded, do not affect the very high appreciation which the design merits, and it is one that will hold its own despite them.
The illustration for the old ballad “Sir Lancelot du Lake”, which is reproduced on the opposite page, strikes one as less mature. The use of solid blacks is not quite mastered; indeed. The black horse of the knight to the right is only deduced after some study as to what the patches in question cannot be intended to represent. It is always a difficult problem to mix conventions. Pure outline with solid blacks in masses as Mr. Beardsley used it, or bold outline with very little if any solid blacks in the background, as Mr. Walter Crane has so often worked it, one can accept; but here, as in a recent edition of The Faerie Queene and not a few modern designs, we are confronted with a puzzle rather than a pattern, a problem in place of a picture. The puzzle may be ingenious, the problem admirably resolved; but one prefers a picture to be a picture…”11
Many critics of the time seem to have propped up their arguments with observations of rudimentary academism (or amateur botany in the case of the basil) and left it at that, never really tackling (or at a loss to tackle) the true nature of Eleanor’s personal vision. Some reproach her for carrying on with the cause of Pre-Raphaelitism, others reprimand her for daring to “mix conventions” and ignore solid decorative traditions. Further on in the same article in The Studio, the writer mock-playfully takes her Isabella to task for a too-small pot of basil before ending with the observation that she may succeed “among the few of her sex who have managed ‘decorative’ art successfully” and “be trusted to satisfy all reasonable expectations.”
The fate of women artists of the period, it seems, was to be criticized for overt and unnatural masculinity when they attempted works of originality, and to be considered simple hangers-on and artful muses when their work was judged to be appropriately feminine. Eleanor’s drawings must have irritatingly achieved that masculine perfection of colour, form and line only allowable to the… superior sex.
The strengths of Eleanor’s “weaknesses”, though, the perceptible humanity behind her unruffled academism, the person who speaks intimately of things behind the solid figures in their accomplished settings, are to be found elsewhere… in the wings of angels.
A Gallery of Angels’ Wings
1. “The Gift that is Better than Rubies”. 1899.
2. “Love’s Not Time’s Fool”, from the sonnet “True Love” by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Included in “Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs & Lyrics”. Hodder & Stoughton. London. c. 1919.
3. “Love Will Find Out The Way”. From “The Great Adventurer”, anonymous seventeenth century poem. “Palgrave’s Golden Treasury”, ibid.
4. “The Angel at the Door”. Eleanor may here have been depicting the belief (possibly medieval in origin) that mendicants were Angels disguised in human form, and paupers perceived as “God’s Children”.
5. “June is Dead”. This was apparently Eleanor’s diploma work for the Royal Watercolour Society, and was exhibited there in the winter of 1915.
6. From the poem by Robert Browning: “James Lee’s Wife”, first published in 1864 and illustrated by Eleanor for the 1909 Chatto & Windus edition of “Dramatis Personae and Dramatic Romances & Lyrics”. The image evokes a line from Part II, verse IV: “Love’s voyage full-sail…”
7. Illustration for “An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song, on the Lady Elizabeth and the Count Palatine being married on St Valentine’s Day”, by John Donne (1572-1631). The happy couple in whose honour the poem was composed later became Frederick V and Elizabeth (the “Winter Queen”) of Bohemia. Eleanor’s artwork was the frontispiece to “The Book of Old English Songs & Ballads” published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1915.
8. Illustration for “A Morning Song” (from Cymbeline), by William Shakespeare, included in the same book.
9. Illustrating “The Surprise” by Sir Edward Sherburne (c. 1616-1702). Ibid.
10. For “Cupid Indicted” by John Lyly (1554-1606). Ibid.
11. “The Blush”, undated watercolour.
12. From “The Story of St Elizabeth of Hungary” by William Canton (1845-1926), published by Herbert & Daniel. 1912.
13. “Whilst Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night”, from “Carols” published by De La More Press. 1925.
~~~
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Eleanor’s work is her treatment of angels.
Winged angels and cupids sporting a spectrum of coloured feathers were not a creation of Brickdale’s own. As an artist/designer she would doubtless have been aware that historically angels had been represented in this way for centuries. From early Romanesque manuscripts and mosaics to the ecclesiastical stained glass designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany in churches throughout America at the end of the nineteenth century, examples abounded of these colourful portrayals. Instead of the Angelic Host alighting with softly-folded halo-white wings, they emerged in a joyous riot of rainbow colours, revealing how the artists reveled in their celestial subject, despite the frequently somber depictions required for the circumstance.
The wings on Eleanor’s angels are often a riot of colour, far outnumbering those few with more drab and conventional pinions. Scarlet, emerald green, sky blue… exceptional hues for an artist who is most often reproached for her staid depictions and straight-laced figures. But, more than their plumage, Eleanor’s angels are even more unusual: most of them are earthbound.
Eleanor depicted, with the notable exception of a dark-pinioned angel of Death and the angel of the Charles Rolls memorial, very few angels in flight. Instead of implausibly fluttering in midair, her cherubs perch on ladders, hide behind skirts, carry damsels across streams or even sulk in stocks. Her angels knock at doors to beg pittance, ply the tillers of boats under sail, spread or fold their wings, but rarely take to the air. They are Everyman’s angels, not so much a heavenly host descended from on high, but the new incarnations of ourselves, when our souls have achieved the purity needed to take flight, reminders that earthbound as we are, more lofty perspectives are only denied us through our own failings. Her cupids are reflections of our ambitions and fears as children: earnest, eager, inquisitive and easily reprimanded and subdued; they have nothing in common with the portly putti of the Renaissance and Baroque, and their matter-of-fact portrayal in familiar settings makes them all the more intriguing.
The bright plumage links us to the “merveilleux” of the medieval mind, when the wings of the world’s stage could hold all manner of creatures and beings and marvels. They belie the subdued Tudor fastidiousness too often associated with Eleanor’s illustrative work and link her directly to the medieval painters such as Fra Angelico, Bellini, Ghirlandaio and Crivelli. Without the intervention of the centuries and the printing press, Eleanor might well have been painting in tempera on vellum with an equal sense of finely executed wonder.
The angels not-in-flight link her to we modern viewers, to a sense of solid and perhaps inescapable humanity, anchored in flesh but potentially free in spirit to see art in the whole of the world, to find sense in the language of landscape and our dialogue with it. Her angels are indeed messengers (truly they are angelos in the ancient sense), but for the interior dialogue we establish within ourselves and with our world.
Eleanor reserves her depictions of childlike wonder in Nature to be chaperoned by fairies and sprites, notably in “The Elfin Route made Visible by the Four-Leafed Clover”, one of four illustrations for “Legends of the Flowers” published in the 1924 Christmas Edition of The Illustrated London News, where a fairy host flutters and postures before the eyes of a wide-eyed girl. All her fairies have the wings of butterflies, moths, or dragonflies. They are spirits of Nature, not evocations of the nature of the spirit.
Eleanor mixes flowers and fairies most willingly, though her imps and fays are often more akin to the denizens of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market than to the wholesome flower fairies of Lang’s Fairy Books; they bring a life of their own, rather than simply reflecting what nursery wishes we might project upon them, hints of a deeper narrative than matching pastel robes and petals. (They are very much on the edge of our familiar quotidian world; in the same manner medieval illuminators peopled the margins of their familiar texts with extraordinary and exotic marvels.) Even in these visions inspired by childhood, Eleanor evokes the incredibly rich – and often dark and complex – history of the folk of Faërie in the British Isles.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale is not so much an “inheritor” of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition as an artist two generations removed who aspired to the same ideals. Her quest, however, is an individual one, and out of step with a society obsessed with modernism. She did not so much seek to emulate or imitate the Pre-Raphaelites as to search for her inspiration in the same sources as they used. Her knowledge of the periods she portrays is not second-hand, not a mannerism, but an individual reinterpretation of an original aesthetic; her work is a personal Renaissance of ideals, not the swan song of a bygone era. It merits a renewed regard on our part to interpret and appreciate it properly. She well deserved the hard-won respect and success she undoubtedly achieved during her lifetime; she deserves to be better remembered and appreciated today.
~~~
FOOTNOTES
1. English Book Illustration of To-day; appreciations of the work of living English illustrators, with lists of their books.
(Referring to the Rossetti’s illustrations for: The Moxon Tennyson. 1857.)
Chapter 1. Some Decorative Illustrators.
By Rose Esther Dorothea Sketchley (b. 1875).
London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. Ltd.
2. Modern Illustration, by Joseph Pennell. [1857-1926]
(From his own introduction)
The Ex Libris Series. Edited by Gleeson White.
London: George Bell & Sons. 1895.
3. In 1902, when speaking to me in terms of unbounded admiration of Miss Fortescue Brickdale’s work, he said to me, “I feel inclined to throw away my palette and brushes. What are my things by the side of such stuff as hers.” He said he felt almost knocked over by them, the vividness of conception having been carried out so forcibly and so adequately by complete execution.
Excerpt from Chapter VII: LEIGHTON
G. F. WATTS, REMINISCENCES
By Mrs. Barrington Russell (d. 1933).
GEORGE ALLEN, London, 1905.
4. Entry for Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale in The Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators by Simon Houfe:
BRICKDALE, Eleanor Fortescue RWS 1871-1945
Illustrator, painter and designer. She was born in 1871, the daughter of a barrister and studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art, the RA Schools and with Byam Shaw. She won a prize for the best decoration of a public building in 1896 and began to exhibit at the RA the same year. She represents the last phase of Pre-Raphaelitism, her highly detailed and meaningful little pictures are crammed with medievalism and moral sentiment. She was the ideal illustrator of legend and particularly for those expensive coloured gift books of the 1900s where her bright colours and haughty figures were set off to advantage on the ample pages. She was also a talented stained glass artist and designed windows for Bristol Cathedral. Her work was sometimes criticised for its confusion of black to white making outlines difficult to see and occasionally on scale ‘piggies the size of white rats need a good deal of ingenious defence’. The Studio, Vol.13, pp 103-108. ARWS, 1902; RWS 1919.
Illus: A Cotswold Village [J. A. Gibbs 1898]; Ivanhoe [1899]; Tennyson’s Poems [1905]; Child’s Life of Christ [M. Dearmer, 1906]; Pippa Passes [R. Browning, 1908]; Dramatis Personae [R. Browning 1909]; Beautiful Flowers [Wright, 1909]; Tennyson’s Idylls of the King [1911]; Story of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary [W. Canton 1912]; The Gathering of Brother Hilarius [M. Fairless 1913]; The Book of Old English Songs and Ballads [1915]; The Golden Book of Famous Women [1920]; Fleur and Blanchefleur [1922]; Palgrave’s Golden Treasury [1924]; Christmas Carols [1925]; A Diary of an Eighteenth-century Garden [D. C. Calthrop, 1926]; The Gentle Art [D. C.Calthrop, 1927].
Exhib: Leighton House, 1904; L; RA; RWS.
Colls: Birmingham; Leeds.
Bibl: The Studio, Winter No., 1900-01 p. 71 illus.; Modern Book Illustrators and Their Work, Studio, 1914, illus.; M. Hardie Watercolour Paint. in Brit. Vol III, 1968, pp 130-131; G. L. Taylor, EFB Centenary Exhibition, Ashmolean, 1972-73.
5. Excerpt from an article in The Studio, Volume 20, Issue 89. August 1900
6. Excerpt from The Lay Figure: WOMEN AS ARTISTS. The Studio, Volume 20, Issue 88. July 1900.
7. From : “The Designs of Archibald Knox for Liberty & Co.”
Adrian J. Tilbrook . Originally published by Ornament Press, London, 1976.
EFB is included in a list of Designers known to have worked for Liberty & Co. along with other well-known artists and designers of the day, including Jessie M. King and of course the aforementioned Archibald Knox.
Excerpt from the chapter “Archibald Knox. London 1897-1912.”:
[Liberty’s] policy of anonymity [of the designers used] was employed even in the case of designers/painters who had achieved some repute within their own particular idiom, and with whom the association of objects designed for ‘a taste and fashion’ conscious ‘middle class’ buying public would, presumably, have been commercially successful as in the cases of Jessie M. King…, Christopher Dresser…, Bernard Cuzner…. and Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, all of whom had designed objects for Liberty & Co.
8. From The Studio, July 1901
9. See Houfe.
10. Rex Vicat Cole in The Art and Life of Byam Shaw (1932, p. 70)
11.“Eleanor F. Brickdale, Designer and Illustrator.”Article by “E B S”, The Studio, March 1898.
~~~
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1898:
A COTSWOLD VILLAGE, by J. Arthur Gibbs, John Murray, London, 1898
17 line drawings as chapter headings (The book also contains numerous photographs.)
1899:
IVANHOE, by Sir Walter Scott, George Bell & Sons, London
10 line drawings
1901:
THE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A. Constable and Co. London
In Volume 24, Issue 105 for December 1901, The Studio ran the following review: In twenty volumes….The chief characteristics of this edition are that its volumes are of a handy size, that it is printed in a good and legible type, and that it is illustrated by a series of drawings reproduced in colours by some well-known modern artists. The most successful of the latter are Lady Macbeth, by E. F. Brickdale, Timon of Athens by Gerald Moira…
This evidently was another early venture into illustration for Eleanor. It is interesting to note that Gerald Moira would also become known for his stained glass designs, some of which had been showcased in an earlier edition of The Studio (Volume 18, October 1899). Constable and Co. advertised these volumes thus in the back of other published works in 1902: SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. Illustrated Edition of the Works of. In 20 Imperial 16mo Volumes with coloured title-page and end-papers designed by Lewis Day, and a specially designed coloured illustration to each Play, the artists being: L. Leslie Brooke, Byam Shaw, Henry J. Ford, G. P. Jacomb Hood, W. D. Eden, Estelle Nathan, Eleanor F. Brickdale, Patten Wilson, Robert Sauber, John D. Batten, Gerald Moira, and Frank C. Cowper. The title-page and illustrations printed on Japanese vellum. Cloth gilt, extra, gilt top, gilt back, with headband and bookmarker, 2s. 6d. net per volume, or £2 10s. the set. Each volume sold separately.
1905:
POEMS, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Bell & Sons, London, 1905
70 line drawings: 2 bookplates, frontispiece, vignette on title page, illustration at head of each work, some (unlisted) plates, all in black & white.
This glowing praise appeared in the January 1906, Volume 36 edition of The Studio:Tennyson. Illustrated by ELEANOR FORTESCUE BRICKDALE. (London: George Bell and Sons) 7s. and 6d net. ~ It may justly be claimed for the charming Endymion series that it is the best illustrated edition of the British poets that has yet appeared, and the new volume certainly shows no falling off in attraction. The publishers are to be congratulated on having secured the services of Miss Brickdale, for she has shown herself thoroughly in touch with her theme and fully worthy to rank with her predecessors, W. Heath Robinson, Alfred Garth Jones, Robert Anning Bell and Byam Shaw. With the last-named she has been, from the first, in close sympathy.
Understandably proud of this approval, Messrs Bell’s Books made sure they capitalized on it by including the first part of the piece in their future advertisements. A 1910 entry in the section extolling the virtues of their range of books, inserted in the “Monographs on Great Writers” series ~ in this case Chaucer ~ listed the entire Endymion range to date, preceded by the announcement: New and Cheaper Uniform Edition. Post 8vo. 3s 6d net. each. The excerpt from The Studio then appeared rather boastfully beneath.
1906:
A CHILD’S LIFE OF CHRIST, by Mabel Dearmer (Methuen)
5 colour illustrations
A review in The New York Times for December 7th 1907 informed readers that: “A Child’s Life of Christ” is told in the form of a continued narrative by Mabel Dearmer (Dodd, Mead & Co. $2.) It is a book of 300 pages, rather large print, with beautiful illustrations in color by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, and black-and-white reproductions from pictures.
This book was recommended in a 1918 publication compiled by Lilian Stevenson, “Author of Amor Vincit Omnia” written reassuringly on the title page. Produced by The Student Christian Movement, London, A Child’s Bookshelf. Suggestions on Children’s Reading, with an Annotated List of Books on Heroism, Service, Patriotism, Friendliness, Joy and Beauty. (2/6d Net), was a virtuous volume full of useful titles for pious parents who, anxious to raise their offspring in an unimpeachable fashion, were presumably seeking guidance on acceptable ways to do it. The lengthy table of contents included sections on “Citizenship and Love of Country; Wonder and Discovery; Adventure and Heroism;” etc. On page 88, in a list of suitable books under the heading: “The Hero of Heroes”, Mabel Dearmer’s work had an honourable mention, advertised thus: (Methuen 4s. 6d net) For younger children. Very beautiful and reverent. With illustrations by Florence Brickdale.
1908:
PIPPA PASSES AND MEN & WOMEN, by Robert Browning, Chatto & Windus, London, 1908
Frontispiece, 10 colour illustrations
The December 14th 1920 edition of the Harvard University student magazine, “The Harvard Crimson”, included this book in their feature: “CHRISTMAS TIME IS BOOK TIME. A Select List of Gift Books at Reduced Prices.” Clarifying that it came with a decorative cover and was “illustrated in color by E. F. Brickdale”, it retailed at the “Special price, $1.50.”
1909:
DRAMATIS PERSONAE AND DRAMATIC ROMANCES & LYRICS by Robert Browning, Chatto & Windus, London, 1909
10 colour illustrations
In the section “Art Books: Travel Books and Gift Books” for December 1909 in Volume XVI of The Burlington Magazine, this appraisal was offered: ‘Dramatis Personae and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics.’ By Robert Browning. Illustrated by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. Chatto and Windus. 6s. net.
As in her illustrations to ‘Pippa Passes’ and ‘Men and Women’, Miss Brickdale in the volume before us uses Browning’s poetry rather as the inspiration than the subject of her drawings. ‘James Lee’s Wife,’ for instance, gives her one design – a naked love with pink wings steering a medieval boat in which a lover and his mistress in medieval costume lie half- hidden by a tawny sail – ‘With whom began Love’s voyage full sail.’ The plate accompanying ‘Abt Vogler’ shows a cottage girl in act to descend from the scullery with a pail of water down a step ladder into the cellar she is going to scrub. The connexion? Merely the line – ‘But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;’ and the expression in the girl’s eyes shows the application. These two examples are sufficient to show the principle on which Miss Brickdale works. Her drawings, as ever, are admirable in design and colour, and, save for that troublesome yellow (e.g in the frontispiece), are well reproduced.
Earlier in that year, the August edition of The Studio had included in its Studio Talk columns the following evaluation: “At the same [Messrs Dowdeswell’s] galleries Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale’s drawings, inspired by Browning’s poems, exhibited all the characteristics of her painting to advantage. They showed in many fine passages of work advancement even on previous success, and an imagination always responsive to poetical influence. This responsiveness was refreshing, since the poetic title is still adhered to in some quarters only as an adventitious interest to the actual painting.”
Apparently both Dowdeswells and the Leicester Galleries exhibited Eleanor’s original watercolours which were then to be reproduced as illustrations to books such as this one, on a number of occasions.
December 1911’s number of Chicago-based magazine The Dial, “a semi-monthly journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information” produced a review in its section for “Holiday Publications”, as follows: ”Browning lovers will welcome the beautiful edition of “Dramatis Personae, and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics” issued by the Houghton Mifflin Company in uniform style with their last year’s edition of “Pippa Passes, and Men and Women”, and, like that, beautifully illustrated in color by Miss E. Fortesque Brickdale. The text of the poems is that of their first publication, with some exceptions referred to in a “Publisher’s Note”. “Saul” is omitted, as it was included in the above-mentioned companion volume. The book is an admirable pocket-volume, leather-bound and free from stiffness. The ten illustrations catch the spirit of the poems, and exhibit skill and taste.”
The poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972), who from 1925 was to be the last editor of The Dial, pronounced that: “Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.” It could have applied to Eleanor’s interpretations as much as to Browning’s verses themselves.
BEAUTIFUL FLOWERS AND HOW TO GROW THEM, by Horace J. Wright & Walter P. Wright, T.C. & E.C. Jack Ltd., London and Edinburgh, 1909 & 1922
10 colour illustrations. (Other illustrations by: Beatrice Parsons, Hugh L. Norris, Margaret Waterfield, A. Fairfax Muckley, Francis C. James, Anna Lea Merritt and Marie Low.)
The weekly journal Nature, in its issue for December 2nd 1909, applauded the book in a benevolent review: “This work will take a high place amongst recent publications dealing with the popular and fascinating art of floriculture. The authors have made a selection of the best and most beautiful flowers for cultivation in the garden and greenhouse. These flowers, numbering 100 in all, are illustrated in full-page coloured plates, which are excellent reproductions of flower paintings by such well-known artists as Beatrice Parsons, Eleanor Fortescue Brick-Dale……”
Although the work was originally published in a two-volume set with considerably more colour plates in 1909, it was reissued in a condensed edition dated 1922. The initial version must have been rather more sumptuous ~ the later one allowing only four illustrations per artist to be included. This edition was however distinguished by a beautiful Art Nouveau design on the cover.
1910:
ELEANOR FORTESCUE BRICKDALE’S GOLDEN BOOK OF SONGS & BALLADS. Hodder & Stoughton. London.
With 24 tipped-in colour plates.
The date of publication given here is approximate, as some sources suggest it to be as early as 1910 (although unlikely compared to other work of that period), or even as late as 1919. There may have been some confusion with The Book of Old English Songs & Ballads, often regarded as undated, but apparently published circa 1915 (see below). It is possible that some of the illustrations were also confused, or reproduced in both volumes.
1911:
THE IDYLLS OF THE KING, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Hodder & Stoughton, London, New York, Toronto, nd (1911)
16 colour illustrations. (These watercolours were also exhibited, along with others, 37 in total, in an exhibition held at the Leicester Galleries [London] in the same year.)
Two reviews appeared for the paintings in the December 1911 edition of The Studio. In the section Studio Talk, the writer waxed lyrical: The Leicester Galleries have been holding an exhibition of Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale’s illustrations to Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”. It cannot be said that Pre-Raphaelitism is dead while Miss Fortescue Brickdale is alive – at least Pre-Raphaelitism in the spirit if not in the letter, though in many points also in that. The Pre-Raphaelites held that art was exalted by choice of exalted theme, and Miss Fortescue Brickdale would be at one with them in this. It is not the commonplaces of life that appeal to her brush. Very charming in all her pictures is the refreshing sense of green fields and rivers – with a very elaborate and much-worked method she succeeds in retaining in all her glimpses of the country the sensation of a genuine and unfaded “impression”. This in itself contributes not a little to the poetry of her style in the interpretation of a great poem.
A rather more reserved comment appeared in the Reviews and Notices section for that same month: “The Idylls of the King”. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Illustrated in colour by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. (London and New York: Hodder and Stoughton.) 15s. net. We have commented elsewhere in this number….on the drawings executed by Miss Brickdale for this edition of “The Idylls of the King,” and it only remains for us therefore to say that the reproduction of them seems to us to be very satisfactory, but we think the border used as a setting for all of them is rather too obtrusive and detracts from the effectiveness of the pictures. In other respects the get-up of the volume is excellent; the type though not large is clear and restful, and the binding at once pleasing and appropriate to the contents.
Further on, in Volume 54 of The International Studio for January 1915, the book was again included in Reviews and Notices for that issue, this time in rather more favourable fashion: “Idylls of the King.” By Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Illustrated in colour by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. (London: Hodder and Stoughton.) 6s. net. – This edition of Tennyson’s Idylls with its clear, legible type, its tasteful binding, and above all its dozen charming illustrations in colour by Miss Fortescue Brickdale, will doubtless prove one of the most popular gift books of the present season. This talented artist has a host of admirers, and the theme which has here engaged her brush is one which exactly suits her artistic temperament.
By 1919 a copy of Tennyson’s Idylls, illustrated by Eleanor, had found its way into the Chicago Public Library, among other places. In their “Book Bulletin” for that year, it was noted thus: “Tennyson, Alfred. Idylls of the King. Hodder $1.50.” (The purchase price being included presumably because local government felt it their solemn duty to inform the public where their funds were going.) “Highly coloured illustrations by E. F. Brickdale make this an addition to any collection.”
1912:
THE STORY OF SAINT ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY, by William Canton, Herbert & Daniel, London (with Dana Estes & Company, Boston, for the American edition) nd (1912)
8 colour illustrations
In the “Catalogue of books in the Children’s Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh” for 1920, William Canton was listed as the author of several volumes, including “The Story of St Elizabeth of Hungary, with illustrations by E. F. Brickdale. Although no review was supplied as such, there followed a rather sweet synopsis: “Story, as told in medieval chronicles, of the little princess who was taken from her real home when only four years old and who grew to girlhood in the gray hill castle of the Wartburg. Tells of her goodness, her sufferings and sorrows, of the rose legend of her compassion, and of how after her early death her name was enrolled in the calendar of saints.” This was a tale that clearly stirred Eleanor’s own admiration, for in future years she recurrently depicted St Elizabeth either in portrait or in designs for stained glass.
1913:
THE GATHERING OF BROTHER HILARIUS, by Michael Fairless (Margaret Barber), Gerald Duckworth & Company, London
8 colour illustrations
1915:
THE BOOK OF OLD ENGLISH SONGS & BALLADS, Hodder & Stoughton, London, New York, Toronto. nd (1915)
24 colour illustrations
Volume 66 of The Studio for October 1915 to early 1916 included this opinion of the work: “The Book of Old English Songs and Ballads.” Illustrated in colour by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. (London: Hodder and Stoughton). Paper 5s. net. Cloth, 6s net. – We have referred elsewhere to the original drawings, twenty four of which are here reproduced in colour, in connection with the exhibition at the Leicester Galleries. Very charming is the picture accompanying Ben Jonson’s “A Hue and Cry after Cupid,” and the illustration “O Love! Has she done this to thee?” to Lyly’s delightful “Cupid and my Campaspe,” and yet another, sumptuous in design and colour, “Our Lady sings Magnificat.” The poetical quality of Miss Brickdale’s work in this volume is for the most part in her delicate and very pleasing craftsmanship rather than in the pictorial ideas, which might, some of them, seem a little prosaic as illustrations to such charming lines as these here reprinted, did not the beauty of technical accomplishment fill our eyes.
The Burlington Magazine Volume 28 number 252 for November 1915 noted in its “Publications Received”; column that: The Book of Old English Songs and Ballads illust. in colour by E. F. Brickdale, broch. 5s., cl. 6s. [is] an early “Christmas” book. Miss Brickdale’s admirers will find the 24 originals of the drawings reproduced, on exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, Leicester Sq., from 2nd Oct until mid-Nov.
THE STORY OF SAINT CHRISTOPHER & SAINT CUTHBERT, by Mary MacGregor. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack; New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co.
With eight coloured illustrations and black & white head and tailpieces by Eleanor.
1919:
PALGRAVE’S GOLDEN TREASURY OF SONGS & LYRICS, by Francis Turner Palgrave, Hodder & Stoughton, London.
11 colour illustrations
(The bibliography of the article by Emily Hicks in the Spring 2007 issue of Illustration Magazine dates this publication from 1911; the catalogue of the centenary exhibition of Eleanor Brickdale’s work at the Ashmolean Musem in 1972 gives the date 1924.)
1920:
ELEANOR FORTESCUE-BRICKDALE’S GOLDEN BOOK OF FAMOUS WOMEN, texts by various authors, Hodder & Stoughton, London, New York, Toronto. nd (1920)
Title page illustration, 16 colour illustrations. (These watercolours were also exhibited, along with others, 27 in total, in an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries the same year.)
The Burlington Magazine Volume 36, number 202 for January 1920 carried this charming review:“The Golden Book of Famous Women” consists of selections from well-known writers concerning the heroines both of fiction and of history, ranging from Cleopatra to Mrs Gamp. Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale is happiest in treating subjects of the 16th century, or earlier, and her delicate Pre-Raphaelite drawings lend an air both of reality and romance to the ladies of those distant days.
1921:
STORIES OF THE SAINTS, by Grace Hall, George C. Harrap and Company.
The frontispiece of Saint Elizabeth and the child Christ in the garden, together with “The Miracle of the Roses” illustrating the same story, were apparently taken from Eleanor’s paintings for the 1912 William Canton story (see above). Other artists whose work appeared in this volume “for children young and old” included the contemporary Willy Pogány (1882-1955) and Evelyn Paul (1883-1963), but also Hans Memling and even Fra Angelico.
1922:
THE SWEET AND TOUCHING TALE OF FLEUR & BLANCHEFLEUR: A MEDIEVAL LEGEND, translated from the French by Mrs. Leighton, Daniel O’Connor, London. 1922
37 coloured line drawings
1925:
CAROLS, De la More Press, London
Coloured line drawings and 6 watercolour illustrations
The De la More Press was founded in 1895 by Alexander Moring. It was a publisher that seemed to specialize in limited editions, frequently printed on handmade paper, of classic works such as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Edward Fitzgerald’s translation, first imprint 1901), Ben Jonson (The Alchemist, 1903), and Chaucer (The Knight’s Tale, 1904). Moring apparently wanted to produce work in a manner “worthy of the craft”.
1926:
DIARY OF AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GARDEN, by Dion Clayton Calthrop, Williams & Norgate, London
One colour illustration and 24 line drawings
“The Musical Quarterly”, a magazine founded in 1915, printed an article in Volume XVI issue 3, dated 1930, written by Eva Mary Grew (wife of Sydney Grew, editor of The British Musician, a periodical published in the 1920’s and late 30’s), and entitled “Some Obscure English Diarists and their Music”. In this she noted:“Thus we had published in England recently (by Williams and Norgate Ltd.) a book called “A Diary of an Eighteenth-Century Garden” written by Dion Clayton Calthrop; into which come a few passing musical references, though only as to music as a part of social life: “...The church choir to visit me with carols of that good King who did look out on the feast of Stephen and many others. Mighty pretty to see and to hear, with lanthorns gleaming on the snow and the cobbler playing on his fiddle.”
Although Eleanor’s contribution to Calthrop’s quaintly pictorial prose was not included in Eva Grew’s account, perhaps this particular image appealed to her when she accepted the commission, coming so soon after the illustrations for Alexander Moring.
The American edition of the book, published in that same year by Frederick A. Stokes of New York, was described thus: “A Diary of an Eighteenth-Century Garden, by the hand of Dion Clayton Calthrop, with decorations by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale.”
1927:
THE GENTLE ART, by D. C. Calthrop, Williams & Norgate, London
One colour illustration and 19 line drawings
This was, apparently in Calthrop’s own words, “A perambulatory book of Nature, her streams, lakes, rivers and ponds, in fact all such places where the Gentle Art may be practiced.” It calls to mind one of the most tranquil vignettes for Joseph Arthur Gibbs’ tale of Cotswold country pursuits, and Eleanor’s first foray into book illustration, back in 1898.
Frederick A. Stokes again published an edition in 1928 with Eleanor’s “decorations”.
After her death in 1945, certain of Eleanor’s illustrations were republished in the following titles:
1992:
TREASURY OF BEST-LOVED POEMS, edited by Christopher R. More, Gramercy Publishing, New York
1993:
FORGET-ME-NOT: A FLORAL TREASURY, by P. Todd, Brown and Company, London
1995:
CHILDREN’S CLASSICS: LANCELOT: THE ADVENTURES AND ROMANCES, by Christine Chaundler, illustrated by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale and Thomas MacKenzie, Random House, New York
~~~
THANKS
This newsletter could not have been written without the help of many people.
Thank you to Ann Carling, for her diligent sleuthing and unearthing of quotes, period articles, elusive imagery and rare titles (even discovering several books illustrated by Eleanor that have not appeared in bibliographies), her indefatigable proofreading and organizing of material and for the captions for the image galleries.
To Ruth Prickett, for sending Emily Hicks’ informative article on Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Illustration magazine, Spring 2007, issue 11.
To Dr Mark McDonald, Curator of Old Master Prints and Spanish Drawings, Department of Prints and Drawings, at The British Museum. (For preparing and sending the magnificent “Guardian Angel” print.)
Thanks to John Takis, for kindly sending along frustratingly elusive pages from the July 1901 issue of The Studio.
To the following, for helpful interest, photographs, facts and suggestions:
The Rev. Sandra Lovern and particularly Archivist Anne Griffiths at the Church of St Andrew, Chew Magna, Somerset.
Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Associate Professor in Art History at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Cliff and Monica Robinson for the photograph of Eleanor’s stained glass designer’s mark.
John Allen
Arthur Tait at The Friends of Brompton Cemetery.
Pat Garrett & Paul Goldman of The Children’s Books History Society
~~~
The image of The Forerunner is © The Liverpool Museum. All the images reproduced here are of course the property of their respective owners.
Additionally, I would like to express a certain regret at not being able to present a fuller selection of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s work, and of a more consistent quality. Many of her books are now quite expensive (when they can be found) and online copies are often PDF files of a quality that leaves much to be desired.
Much imagery, while documented, is only available through long and complicated (and expensive) transactions – notably the intriguing “Legends of the Flowers” and many others. Of some images available, little or no information can be found. Even her date of birth is given variously as 1871 and 1872.
Very little has been recently published about Eleanor’s life and work, with the exception of a lengthy chapter in “Illustrating Camelot” by Barbara Tepa Lupack and Alan Lupack, which provides an insightful analysis of her illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls. Strangely, she is completely absent from the otherwise excellent “By a Woman’s Hand: Illustrators of the Golden Age” by Mary Carolyn Waldrep, an overview of the female illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration.
A lavish volume of her work is grandly overdue.
~~~
Posted by John on 15/05/12 | 05:00 PM | Chronicles
BURNT ICE
A Book Cover and a Few Other Things for Later
Over the last few years, I’ve been walking quite a lot, mostly along the edge of the sea.
For this, several reasons, but principally because the edges of things are the most exciting places. All these diligent hikes, which often involve a lot of scrambling along, getting soaked by the rain, blown about by the wind and scuffed by the sun, are not just about getting out in the fresh (sometimes very fresh) air.
They are all about entelechy. If, as Michelangelo is purported to have said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”, then in every landscape there is embedded a narrative.
So, every hike is not only pretty decent exercise, it is about finding the ley lines of story, the alignments of scale, detail, the juxtapositions of elements, the sub-titling of light and atmosphere, that turn a landscape into an account. Somewhere Hidden somewhere, around a headland or over a hill, are the elements of myth and story. And in every landscape, there is always just the right spot from which to see that view.
Landscapes inevitably remind me of paintings. So, each excursion is a treble one, an energetic hike, a brief glimpse of Story and a stroll through a virtual gallery. Solitary walks can be done in good company.
But, if I’ve piqued your curiosity at all, then I have to apologize. What with the current day job, long hours and simply so much to do, it will have to wait the space of a newsletter or two until I can give the subject the time it deserves. (A classic case of pique and run.)
Thus, as the saying goes, watch this space, especially as we’ve just been in New Zealand’s deep south, where the landscape is wild and most inspiring.
BURNT ICE
BURNT ICE, by Steve Wheeler is the first in an unassumingly ambitious science fiction series A FURY OF ACES just published by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia. I took on the cover commission because Steve also has a current day job and long hours, and thought, well, if he can write an entire novel in his spare time, I would put on a sad show if I can’t find the time to do a painting for it.
And, of course, a welcome opportunity to try my hand at science-fiction, not a genre I have had a lot of occasions to explore.
It’s a great book, and no, this is NOT just bit of unabashed PR for a friend; it really is good. Like science-fiction is supposed to be, it’s full of unexpected and original concepts; like science fiction often fails to do, the crypto-tech jargon doesn’t have you scratching your head wondering what it means or rummaging through the glossary. (Besides, you really don’t feel like putting down the book for the time it takes to look things up.)
Burnt Ice compares to the series Firefly and the movie Serenity, while situated in a very different universe. It eschews all the currently fashionable tendencies (retro-this and steampunk-that) and relies on solid and very likeable characters, a suitably twisted plot, and just plain old good story-telling. (Okay, I concede, there are creepy aliens. LOTS of creepy aliens. WITH tentacles.) If you’re a card-holding sci-fi aficionado, you’ll love it, if you’re new to science fiction, this could well be the introduction you’ve been waiting for.
As for the ICE in the title, it’s got little to do with H20, but you can find that out for yourselves. (I’m guessing ACES has little to do with card games as well…)
There’s a Facebook page with reviews and such.
Amazon has the Kindle edition.
Or, you can get a real book, with pages, a cover, and so on, directly from the publishers: Burnt Ice.
Steve will be launching BURNT ICE at the Weta Cave in Miramar on Saturday April 14th from noon until 2 pm. A celebration of the book will take place at Wellington Whitcoulls on Lambton Quay (formerly Borders) at 7pm on 1st May. If you’re after signed copies, those are the dates. (For you overseas folks, patience - if the books get the reception they deserve, Steve should become a fixture of sci-fi conventions the world over.)
Posted by John on 12/04/12 | 06:34 PM | Chronicles
DISAPPEARING INTO THE INSTANT
Or the Quiet Art of Balancing in the Present
Mist is a must. Overcast skies and low cloud are good. A little rain as well, but light.
And speaking of light, the one I want is that nebulous light, where shadows are filled, the light that fills shadows softly, the light you get at sea.
Autumn. By far the best season, though autumn in the Antipodes, with its trees ever green, is notional. Thankfully, where I’m bound, the trees of faraway home have been planted as well. Because that’s where I’m headed. To see those who have gone home.
Cemeteries are often very beautiful places, especially if Time has had time there as well, to leave traces of its passage. And Nature loves a cemetery, Nature seeks to cover those stones in lichen, to send roots down deep, to bury the buried in leaves.
The Romantics projected melancholy upon Nature’s canvas. In a cemetery, the melancholy is part of the landscape, patiently accumulated by the grace of that very thing we cannot escape: time.
The human race has never been very good about dealing with the inevitability of death, witness the enormous place it occupies in story and myth, in psychology and ritual, in secular and pious thought, certainly because none of the solutions offered is entirely satisfactory, or enduringly so.
Pyramid and potter’s field, necropolis and tumulus, catacomb and columbarium, we busily burrow into the ancient ones - or pay to visit them - and pay dutiful respect in those where we will one day go ourselves.
But don’t worry, no lengthy discourse on all that, it’s a subject that’s been done to death by earnest philosophers, ennui is detailed in every good dictionary, and Ozymandias doesn’t need any more lone and level sands or the Raven more to quoth, at least from me. I only visit cemeteries because they are so beautiful.
They contain a somber beauty, as do all silently decaying monuments. Lichen transforms a crucified Christ into a Green Man. Plastic bouquets weather and fade into pastel studies, broken cherubs lie, still in flight where they have fallen, a stone angel steadfastly leans, parallel to the slanting rain.
Nor can you rush through a cemetery, decorum hobbles your stride, fills it with patches around which you must tread carefully; it offers chance angles and sudden juxtapositions, a geometry of regret and an ostentation of impermanence. But most of all, I’m trying to photograph the stillness.
For several reasons. Because the immediate nature of the photo is simultaneously a negation of time as well as a complete acquiescence to the tyranny of the instant escaped forever, an eidolon of pixels.
Because of the relinquishment of things derelict, which is the true tribute to mortality. But mostly because pictures speak, with their slim silver tongues, quite eloquently for themselves.
All photos taken in Karori cemetery, near Wellington.
Special thanks to Ann Carling.
Posted by John on 16/03/12 | 06:00 PM | Chronicles
IMAGES WERE MAGIC ONCE
Or The Need for Words in a World of Pictures
It is indeed getting pretty sad, I thought, when I write a text at someone’s request, send it dutifully off (albeit certainly so late it is no longer of any use, or for some catalogue long gone to the printer) and then cannot for the life of me recall who it was for.
Although, the modest silver lining is of course stumbling upon it again and thinking well, there could be a place for that…
While we live in a self-proclaimed world of images, and experts remind us how we are constantly solicited by and bombarded with imagery of all sorts, I often wonder if our pretended inability to digest them all is because their language has become in a way a foreign one, a background noise not inviting a reply, or even thoughts. We need to learn how to articulate our imagery, and how to tell stories again.
IMAGES WERE MAGIC ONCE
Images were magic once. They adorned the walls of deep caverns, propitiated, evoking victory over creatures dangerous and necessary for survival. In that way, man possessed the essence of those creatures as well as their nourishing flesh.
Images were language once. The earliest letters, long after the earliest hieroglyphs (the meaning of “hieroglyph” is “sacred carving”), evoked creatures and elements. They summed up, or conjured, or invoked those things they named, and gradually gathered meanings as they grew more abstract and distanced from imagery.
Images were true once. Stories of ogres, dragons, princesses and knights grew in the minds of those harkening to the storytellers the Brothers Grimm patiently listened to as well. The same kinds of stories were sung and told through countless generations, before their penning by scribes. Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Jason, Arthur, and countless more, before we invented fiction as we know it, possessed images that were real in the minds of those who knew the stories.
Now images are no longer magic, no longer language, no longer necessarily true. They are used, abused, manipulated, commercialized and bought and sold like other commodities. We take them for granted. We associate them with immaturity – we believe “serious” imagery deals with life, not with things imagined.
Nevertheless, fantasy art is the inheritor of that magic, language and truth that once only it communicated. Fantasy is the realm of archetype, meaningless only if art itself were to disappear from the face of the earth. If I could claim as my own words written more than a century ago, it would be these:
“En effet, lorsque l’époque où un homme de talent est obligé de vivre, est plate et bête, l’artiste est, à son insu même, hanté par la nostalgie d’un autre siècle.
.. Chez les uns, c’est un retour aux âges consommés, aux civilisations disparues, aux temps morts; chez les autres, c’est un élancement vers la fantastique et vers le rêve…” ~ J. K. Huysmans (1848-1907), “À Rebours”, 1884.
(“The truth is, when the period at which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is, unconsciously to himself, haunted by a sensation of morbid yearning for another century… In some cases, it is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others, it is an impulse towards the fantastic, the land of dreams, it is a vision more or less vivid of a time to come whose images reproduce, without his being aware, as a result of atavism, that of by-gone epochs.” ~ J. K. Huysmans, “Against the Grain”, published in English in 1926.)
The resonance of fantasy is as pertinent as ever, but fantasy is a master of disguises, and always reappears where we least expect it. The magic and the truth remain; it is up to us to learn the language again.
Abandoned, unlit, the lighthouse still stood, alone on the headland, the keeper no longer venturing to kindle the fires; ships no longer came. Decades now, since the Lastships had sailed over the horizon, departing the human realms, their great sails shining like the sinking sun.
Mortals no longer came to the shores; so painful was the longing, so persistent the last glimpse of the great ships, light filling their sails like so many clouds at sunset, slowly fading.
But Almathea came alone, hugging her thin shoulders against the wind. She gazed at the headland. The faces were clearer today, the cheekbones sharper. The very land itself yearned after the vanished demiurges, clouds echoed their silhouettes, the waves chanted their names, and now earth and stone moved, shifted and formed, a silent plea in their likeness, to call and lure them back to the land.
She frowned and shivered. It was beginning to rain. With a grimace she tugged at the nacre amulet, snapping the thin cord that held it. At her feet, drifts and mounds of similar charms, now pitted by frost and dulled by salt and wind, mute witness of desperate rituals of hope abandoned, first by the priesthoods, then by the people themselves. She knelt, reached out to place hers atop the pile.
Then suddenly she stood, anger flaring through her whole body, she would not, not, never. She hurled the amulet outward, seabirds scattering. It caught the light an instant, then was swallowed by the waves.
She would never, never give up. Never. She would bring Them home.
From “The Lastships” by J. Frank-Lynne.
~ ~ ~
“This is your elegy, the grey sea grieving –
This and the gulls’ disconsolate reply.
Beyond your hearing is their derelict cry.”
Excerpt from “This is Your Elegy” by James Reeves (1909-1978).
Posted by John on 15/02/12 | 09:00 AM | Chronicles
DRAWING THE LINE SOMEWHERE
Or All About Making Your Mark
One of the best ways to go on about yourself, albeit obliquely, is to proffer advice.
So, when given the opportunity, especially with a 150-word cap on each snippet, the challenge of condensing something quite nebulous and complicated into a very few words, there was no passing it up. (The opportunity to babble on, but briefly, is the siren call of those who can’t really manage a coherent stringing together of thoughts, mine generally being rather like when the necklace string breaks and the beads cascade everywhere.)
I used to consider sketching a means to an end. I still do, except I’ve revised my definition of what the end should be. I used to dash my thoughts down on paper with great energy. (We all fell victim, in art school, to that standard siren song: that a line had to be unique and be somewhere, that one note in pen and ink was more eloquent than a symphony in pencil.) Now I still dash my thoughts down on paper, but I’ve learned to take my time as well. I used to think a sketch had to be “useful”, the prelude to something serious to be undertaken in colour; now I’ve learned to love their incidental nature, their unexpected turnings and indefinite ends.
Or perhaps I’ve simply unlearned many things. (Time is the great teacher, the only disadvantage being of course, that time takes its time.) At any rate, here they are. In a nutshell. Well, several nutshells. Let’s call it a mixed bag.
It’s all in the February issue of ImagineFX. (There’s even a Dinotopia poster AND a 2012 wall calendar to boot, not to mention a CD-ROM.)
So, buy a copy. Even better, subscribe. ImagineFX is about the best cross-genre fantasy-oriented publication around.
IN OTHER WORDS…
Things being as busy as they are, am still unable to manage a regular newsletter, despite tremendous help from a few good friends. Postponed but not abandoned, though, until such time as I can. Thank you for being so patient.
Posted by John on 18/01/12 | 09:00 PM | Chronicles
STRANDS AND BROKEN SHELLS
Or Thoughts for the Year to Come
I think if I had to choose what seashells I prefer, I would respond “The broken ones.”
I have a collection of intact and exotic shells, mostly purchased in shops, but they have a very different appeal. They are almost abstractions, so elegant in their perfection, so accomplished in their form and intricacy that they are almost cold. They inspire covetousness and competition as well; they are exemplary of the striving for the most beautiful of each sort.
The broken shells, though, are worthless to a true collector, which is certainly why I gather them. They speak so much more elegantly with their broken voices. Of waves and the tugging of the moon, and churning steep pebbled beaches. Of receding foam, and storms and slanting rain. They speak as well of worlds and of living on the edge of them, worlds that touch, but to pass between them means to be damaged, leaving a tithe for passage, a coin of nacre for the ferryman. What iridescence remains is scuffed and scratched, or miraculously preserved in a broken silhouette. They are like the broken statues from ages long fled, where the perfection is ours to imagine if we can, not ours to possess. What is missing belongs to the times-between, what we gain is the opportunity to dream. Chance flotsam in the wake of waves, things stranded in time; the pathos of things is the quintessence of their beauty.
Those broken shells are rather like my thoughts as well, so perfect in my mind, so imperfect when I have done expressing them. Drawings as well are akin to broken shells, the frontier between the imagining and the pencil & paper, while only in the transition from thought to gesture, is nevertheless difficult to cross.
Broken shells are messages of a sort, like old words no one can read, or paintings, once made with purpose now lost. I fill my pockets with them every time, as if by gathering many I could somehow understand what they have to say. They speak of impermanence, in the manner of wabi-sabi, they invite not admiration, but reflection. Their beauty is not self-contained, but shared.
I wish you many tranquil miles of shelving strands and wide seascapes for the new year, and many broken shells to pick up and turn over in your thoughts and hands. Very, very best wishes for 2012.
I hope to see you then. I will have lots of broken shells to share.
Posted by John on 16/12/11 | 07:44 PM | Chronicles
ABOUT THE MOVING OF MOUNTAINS
Or the Able Tools of Patience and Passion
It seems we humans have a certain preoccupation with material things.
We are continually fashioning them, abandoning them, letting time bury them, and, quite recently, digging them up again. Archaeology is a relatively recent human undertaking, though curiosity and greed have always provoked much poking about in the ground. Grave robbers came into being with the first graves, but more altruistic delving began with the Ancient Greeks.
Tantalus’ bones were kept in a bronze jar in Argos (his son Pelops’ were in Olympia). Aeneas’ shield on Samothrace, the tools Epeius used to build the Trojan Horse in a south Italian temple. Orpheus’ lyre was displayed in Apollo’s temple on Lesbos, Marsyas’ flute at Sicyon, the tusks of the Eurymanthian boar in a temple near Naples. The prow of Odysseus’ ship could be admired in a small town in… Spain. The Romans continued, digging up fragments of Greek sculpture to adorn palaces, shipping choice pieces from Egypt – the richest of history’s quarries – all over the Empire. Medieval Italians propped up fallen Roman statues and read the classics in their shade. Eager antiquarians of the 16th and 17th centuries amassed heteroclite collections, pondering on how they might fit with Noachian history.
Personal hoards eventually gave way to national treasures in the 1800’s, once more with Egypt and the Greek world as the testing ground for the new methodologies slowly put in place by the pioneers of the time, part gentleman grave robber, part adventurer archaeologist, payrolled by wealthy individuals and avid historical societies. The list is lengthy: Belzoni, Hoare, Petri, Schliemann, Evans and dozens more. The same fever that pushed explorers through jungles and up mountains pushed others on more careful if nonetheless arduous missions into the remnants of buried and lost traces of humanity, trying to complete the jigsaw puzzle of the past. Whisk brooms and dental picks have perhaps shifted much earth over the centuries, careful stroke by careful stroke, in a patient erosion to uncover new pieces.
Usually, buried things are patient. If they have escaped the vagaries of erosion and pillage, they sagely await discovery. Preserved by time, buried and brought back to the light, all those millions of sites and objects are something we quizzical humans admire and ponder over in unprecedented numbers. It seems the more preoccupied we are with our future, the more intently we stare at the past.
Irene Fanizza is an Italian archaeologist and photographer who has kindly sent information and photos for previous newsletters. Her short text is a reminder that if we have the opportunity to admire all the relics we do, it is because of the ardor of the individuals who undertake quiet crusades on our behalf, testimony that patient passion can move mountains.
STRONG AS THE STONES SHE WAS ABLE TO MOVE
Her name echoes down the corridors, in classrooms and in books, Christiane Desroches Noblecourt was a great French Egyptologist and, in the opinion of the writer, a woman strong and determined enough to have been the first female to direct an excavation in 1938 and afterwards, in 1960, possibly the most epic archaeological undertaking of all time.
Acting as an arbitrator during the Cold War, Christiane was able to bring together 50 countries for one purpose, was able to find the funding and bring together the best team to cope with the incredible and monumental rescue of Abu Simbel, operation that would cost more than $40 million dollars at the time.
To the south of Egypt on the border with Sudan, the area of Abu Simbel contains dozens of archaeological sites. In 1960 with the construction of the Aswan dam and its artificial water supply, these sites were in danger of being drowned and lost forever.
The dam, built to control flooding of the Nile, is an extension of the previous basin which was not sufficiently large for the needs of the country. The new Great dam would create a reservoir (Lake Nasser) large enough to provide electricity to half of the country. This new lake, however, alarmed archaeologists who immediately realized the danger that the much-needed reservoir would create for archaeological sites, whose future would at best be one of complete obliteration.
All this did not happen because fortunately, Christiane’s voice was heard, when doubts were raised over the dangers, Christiane was commissioned by UNESCO to take a census of all sites at risk of flooding, but she did not stop there, the number of endangered sites was too high, the importance of some of these led her to embark on a crusade, a race against the clock and all other obstacles to saving those sites.
She found financial backers and architects and smoothed the path to meetings with the archaeologists, but most especially she promoted the “ idea” of saving the endangered archaeological sites. The basin was ready and the dam project well under way. In journalism we often write about a “big project, “translation”, “bailout”, ”translocation”, or “relocation”, but in my opinion none of these words adequately describe the extent of the toil that was needed in order to save the temples, which were tens of meters high, carved into the rock, fragile and precious as the finest crystal. But between 1964 and 1968, the temples were completely cut into large blocks (weighing from 20 to 30 tons) dismantled, reassembled and raised to a new location 65 meters higher and 300 meters back from the river bank, with the labour of more than two thousand workers, led by a group of Italian quarrymen, experts in marble from Carrara, in an unprecedented technological effort. They faced one of the greatest challenges in the history of archaeological engineering.
And don’t think that the decision to dissect the statues was easy to make. It was an anguished decision, deeply discussed and debated and there were probably quite a few archaeologists who wept over it. It might be said today that they could have done it differently, but for me it makes no difference, what mattered was: mission accomplished.
From the engineering point of view, the mode of transport was resolved, the new installation was defined with the domes of cement that would give shape to the hills on which the temples were to be supported, but the point to consider now is that of the archaeologists who in addition to checking that nothing was ruined by a little clumsy laboring, pledged to restore the balance between the original siting of the temples and the new installation.
In this regard, the archaeologists made the decision to be consistent with that which they had to do, and chose not to consider transport as simply a fortuitous rescue to save only the material wealth of archaeological sites that were in danger, but they also made the commitment to “carry” the cult of the temple, to move it whilst honouring the fundamental reason why the temple was in that exact position in the first place.
I’m talking about the celestial phenomenon, which makes provision for the exact dates and precise times, when the sun’s rays slant into the temple to illuminate the great room and the pharoah’s stone effigies, gilded by the divine rays of the living Sun.
Built during the reign of Ramses II (1265 BCE) , the great temple is the largest in the area and the largest to have been moved, and is dedicated to the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty, Ptah and Ramses himself. To build it took twenty years of hard work not only in architecture alone.
The architects of ancient Egypt aligned the temple so that , on October 21 and February 21 (61 days before and 61 days after the winter solstice), the sun’s rays enter into the sanctuary to illuminate the sculptures on the wall, except for the statue of Ptah, the god associated with the underworld, which remains in shadow.
From studies done, but still very theoretical, the dates should match the king’s birthday and coronation day, but there is no evidence to support this except the fact that if the sun is permitted to enter on those two particular dates it is for a significant purpose.
The light enters and illuminates the statues, the rays are directed primarily on the statue of Ramses. The power of the sun recharges and revitalizes him, beside him Amon Ra and Ra-Horakhty are also partially illuminated and Ptah is the god of darkness beside them perfectly in the shade.
The effort , in moving the temple, to be able to fully replicate the event, however, led to a margin of error of one day (forward) compared to the original dates, creating controversy and a regretful postscript to this otherwise so perfectly successful saga. But bearing in mind all the commitment shown by the people who contributed to the rescue, it should not be subjected to controversy but only relief and gratitude, as fate has decreed that the temples, though not yet a world heritage site, were later to become one at the completion of the work in their new location.
One could almost hope that somewhere, Ramses II and his wife, Queen Nefertari, are nodding their heads in thoughtful approval, he of the saving of the temple, she of the strength and initiative of a member of her sex.
There are those born a few centuries ago, who would have liked to have lived at the time of the great Roman emperors, or in XVII century. I wish I had been born at the time of Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, an Egyptologist and an archaeologist who died in July of this year and is now being commemorated by archaeologists, scholars and by the great centers of archaeological studies as an advocate of one of the largest and most impressive archaeological works ever undertaken, the first woman in history to lead an excavation, curator of the Louvre, Christiane, who together with the Minister of Egyptian cultural heritage shared with the world what they were able to save, leaving to the museums of the world the images of Abu Simbel and its temples, telling the story of what they have done as a duty and not just as a part of a job.
She led the people of France to launch an appeal to the reluctant and indifferent world, a plea for help, launched jointly with the then incumbent French Minister of Cultural Affairs , Andre Malraux: “The power that created the colossal monuments threatened today. . . speaks to us in a voice as exalted as that of the architects of Chartres, as that of Rembrandt. . .Your appeal is historic, not because it proposes to save the temples of Nubia, but because through it the first global civilization publicly claims the world’s art as its indivisible heritage. . .There is only one action over which the indifference of stars and the eternal murmuring of rivers have no sway - it is the act by which man snatches something from death.”
She, who in front of the General Charles de Gaulle, was unimpressed when he at first did not understand what Christiane had set in motion and said: “Mais enfin, Madame, comment avez-vous osé dire que la France sauverait le temple, sans avoir été habilitée par mon gouvernement? ” and replied “Et comment, Général, avez-vous osé envoyer un appel à la radio, alors que vous n’aviez pas été habilité par Pétain? “.
I would have liked to be born at the time of Christiane Desroches Noblecourt and to have responded to her call for help.
Irene Fanizza, Rome, November 2011
Special thanks to Ann Carling for her editorial assistance
IN THE ANTIPODES
For the last two and a half years, have been busily working away at a project I’ve not been able to talk much about. Happily, I no longer need to, as that is being most ably taken care of by others. And who better than by the man running the whole show.
Peter Jackson’s ongoing video blogs are here:
THE HOBBIT - Production video #1
THE HOBBIT - Production video #2
THE HOBBIT - Production video #3
THE HOBBIT - Production video #4
And, amongst all the rumours and speculation and “spy reports”, the only blog really worth reading is here:
An Unexpected Journey: Part 1 - Concerning Hobbiton
An Unexpected Journey: Part 2 – They Call Me Mr. Chubb
An Unexpected Journey: Part 3 – Beginnings and Endings
Eric Vespe, a.k.a. Quint (also known as Fatty Chubb – he has nobody to blame but a mischievous film-maker for that one) has been on the road with Main Unit for nearly a month already. So, while we keep industriously scribbling, doing our best to keep one step ahead of the set builders, he can take you right behind the cameras. Shhh. Quiet on set, please…
OTHERWISE
Otherwise, after two and a half years with a steady day job, I’ve kind of run out of time to continue regularly with newsletters (as well as foolishly and perhaps over-optimistically taking on several writing jobs), despite the wonderfully generous help of all those who’ve propped me up, contributed texts of their own, proofread mine, and generally kept me going, I am taking a break from regularly doing one per month (how on earth I ever managed one every two weeks up until a year ago, I can’t imagine). Perhaps the renouncing of self-imposed deadlines will help. As the saying goes: ce n’est qu’un au revoir.
Posted by John on 16/11/11 | 08:59 AM | Chronicles
SHIPS, SAILS AND FARAWAY PLANETS
The Forgotten Voyage of William M. Timlin
Several months ago, I received one of those offers that cannot be refused. Calla Editions, the fine art book imprint of Dover Publishing, was preparing a re-edition of William M. Timlin’s book The Ship That Sailed to Mars. Would I like to write an introduction?
Well, yes, of course yes.
I had seen the images here and there on the net, and gazed longingly at original editions for sale from antique booksellers. (There was another edition published in the ‘90’s, which is affordable if not cheap, but no judging the quality, seller’s protestations to the contrary.)
Suddenly, there seemed to be so much to find out. Most tantalizing was the web page of someone who had felicitously stumbled on a copy of the book for a few dollars in a yard sale, and who had actually been in touch with Timlin’s descendants. I wrote, but in vain. I wrote to every link provided by the page in question. In vain. I asked all my South African work colleagues, all artists, if they had relations in Kimberley. No luck. I wrote to all my artist acquaintances in South Africa, who promised they would check. No news. I wrote to auction houses offering Timlin’s originals. No replies. My able researcher Ann Carling and I wrote to architects and museums, we received gracious replies and as much help as could be provided from many. Information began to arrive, a clue here, a snippet there.
Left: Portrait of William M. Timlin by John Henry Amshewitz. Right: Newspaper clippings from Kimberley.
A portrait in pencil. Newspaper clippings. Timlin’s personal emblem. Other information, often complementary, often contradictory. I felt like jumping on a plane to Johannesburg and catching a bus to Kimberley; no armchair detective has ever felt more frustrated. Sketches for sale at auction houses, original editions priced at several thousand dollars, landscapes in private collections…
Left: William Timlin’s personal emblem. Right: Cover of the original edition and sketches by Timlin.
A collector in the US sent me a scan of the poster for the ill-starred movie “Get Off The Earth!”, which, alas, it was deemed more prudent, for copyright reasons, not to include. (The story of the whispering silent film actor, Raymond Griffith, is a remarkably poignant one, but had to be reduced to a parenthesis.) From dozens of sources, we gathered little snippets, checked facts as best we could; to my knowledge, this is the first time so much information has been reunited in one text on William M. Timlin. It is paltry enough.
Poster for “Get Off The Earth”, starring Raymond Griffith, followed by the images from Timlin’s book that went into composing the poster. Far right: “Be Yourself”, typical of Raymond Griffith’s productions.
We were not able to find Timlin’s own words, other than those of his fairy tale; we found no images of the decorations he created, those “castle turrets and fairytale dragons” have long fallen prey to the wrecker’s ball. Anecdotes came to light, side alleys that wanted exploring: the site of the Coloseum was bought by the Prudential Insurance Company who duly applied for a demolition permit in order to build an office block. The granting of the permit was hotly contested in 1982 by the Heritage lobby and, in particular, Herbert Prins, an architect/architectural lecturer who specialised in heritage issues. The Prudential publicly accused Herbert that his opposition to the demolition was through some ulterior motive, suggesting that he was in some way to gain possibly as restoration architect if the building was not demolished. Herbert took them to court for defamation but the Prudential settled with an amount of money. Since Herbert did not want to benefit from the loss of the fine building he donated the money to the then Witwatersrand Heritage Trust who used the money to commission South African artist Cecil Skotnes (who died in 2009) to produce a ‘floating trophy’ which is known as the ‘Colosseum Award’ and is awarded annually “in recognition of a notable achievement by an owner, a developer or interested individual or group in conserving a building, clusters of buildings or other place or element/s of the environment.” Timlin would have no doubt approved. (The office block, unoriginally christened the “Colloseum”, was built in 1985. It has since been converted to apartments.)
Left: The Coloseum Theatre, Johannesburg. Right: The Colosseum Award
We discovered grainy photos of his other buildings and monuments. The more we researched, the more William Timlin himself emerged from behind the pages of his book. Images of his landcape paintings and other fantasyscapes slowly accumulated. There were hints of his energy and dedication to the community and the town he called home, little anecdotes and quotes, stories of those ambitions and errors so common to artists (It’s hard not to sympathize with Timlin selling off originals of The Building of the Fairy City on the promise they be made available when a book was to be published, losing track of who had what and where, and doggedly setting out to repaint the book once more.) The more we researched, the more he began to feel very much alive.
Finally, William M. Timlin provided a glimpse of what must endanger any biographer, however modest and ipso facto: the temptation to speak for him, to put into the now-silent mouth the words that should have been said. It is especially acute when dealing with those who express themselves in images, and who leave few words. Consciousness grew of being perched on the tip of the iceberg (or a little expedition working its way diligently upstream in search of the source of the Nile), knowing there was much more that could be discovered had time and resources permitted. Accompanying all this, a sense of regret that his other work, varied and remarkable, is not available to the public.
Left: Landscapes by William M. Timlin, including one from his trip(s) to Bali. Center & right: Fantasy watercolours and sketches from various sources, collections and publications.
Thankfully, an introduction is short. It needs to be to the point; no getting caught up in daydreaming about castles in the air…
Or sailing ships against the stars…
I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing.
SHIPS, SAILS AND FARAWAY PLANETS
The Forgotten Voyage of William M. Timlin
Prosaically, an introduction should introduce, in the manner of an able host, and prepare the reader for an auspicious encounter, enhanced by a few words in the guise of a presentation.
In this instance, having thought long about writing these words of approach, I have an unusual request; I would beg the reader to postpone the introduction, and to read William Timlin’s marvelous and elegant book before turning back to these pages. “The Ship that Sailed to Mars” contains such troubling genius, fragility and conviction that it needs to be read without a priori, if possible with the candour and the desire for wonderment that only children truly possess. When you are done, please kindly return here; there is a quite lot to say about William M. Timlin and his truly remarkable book.
****
Son of Peter Timlin, colliery foreman, and Margaret (née Mitcheson), William was born on April 11, 1892, in Ashington, Northumberland. At grammar school he showed himself to be a precocious artist, winning a scholarship permitting him to attend the Armstrong College of Art, in Newcastle. In the first years of the 1900’s, the family emigrated to South Africa, to a new life in the diamond mining town of Kimberley. Young William joined them in 1912, where he was apprenticed to the prominent architect D. W. Greatbatch. Six years later, Timlin and Greatbatch would be partners, with Timlin carrying on after his partner returned to England in 1921. That same year, for the entertainment of his young son Billy, he began a story about a ship. A ship that sailed to Mars.
Published in 1923, it is today one of the rarest, most original and beautiful children’s books of the 20th century. It was the only book he would ever publish.
****
William M. Timlin, by all accounts, was a prodigiously energetic and active member of the Kimberley artistic community. A pencil portrait, dated 1920, by John Henry Amshewitz, shows a handsome man with a voluntary jaw and contemplative eyes. The firm of Greatbatch & Timlin was responsible for many buildings in the Kimberley area, but it was in the realm of interior decoration of movie theatres farther afield that Timlin’s sensibilities found more fertile ground. Timlin designed several, notably the Colosseum Theatre in Johannesburg, built by Percy Rogers Cooke. Occupying a whole city block, the theatre opened in 1933, a triumph of Egyptian-style Art Deco. Timlin arrayed the auditorium with castle turrets and fairytale dragons. Of his work, Clive Chipkin1 writes: “The Gothic fantasy of the interior was the work of the architect-artist William M. Timlin, whose susceptibilities to a dream world of his own creation were so pronounced that we may regard them as a distinct form of disengagement from the world of monetary and political crisis outside.” Closed in 1985, the Colosseum was demolished. An office block was built on the site. Of Timlin’s work, no trace remains.
Timlin was hardly the retiring dreamer, though, if his spirited activity is any indication. Timlin founded the Art Section of Kimberley’s Athenaeum Club in 1914, remaining chairman until its disbandment in the 1940’s. He regularly exhibited his watercolours, pastels and oils, as well as writing stories, composing and teaching music. (He won a bronze medal in a nationwide competition for his musical compositions.) Member of the South African Academy, Timlin exhibited at the annual salon from 1919 until his death.
He produced (unremarkable) pen and ink drawings for several South African history and travel books, and designed seals, decorations and theatre programs. He was closely associated with the popular South African weekly Outspan, for which he designed covers and contributed many illustrations. His familiar emblem, a white owl with a disturbingly human gaze, was created in memory of the accidental killing of a snowy white owl during a hunting expedition with his father on the Gaap Plateau. (The emblem is a poignant salute to a bird beautiful and mysterious enough to belong in his delightful dream worlds, which Timlin chose instead to fill with weird caricatures of Nature, as in The Zoo, where grotesquely leering creatures contrast with the delicate figures in the foreground.)
In March 1934 he designed the illuminated address commemorating the visit of Prince George to Kimberley. He also began an ambitious series of illustrations for a book entitled “The Building of the Fairy City”, which remained unpublished. As an architect, he was responsible for several major buildings in Kimberley, including the Kimberley Hospital, Boys’ High School, Girls’ High School and the Cenotaph.
William Timlin’s first wife Marjorie was killed in an automobile accident in 1937. Timlin remarried. He died of pneumonia on June 7, 1943, after fracturing his arm in a fall. He was 51, and was survived by his son Billy and his second wife. Timlin’s brother Clifford assembled a large number of his works, later bequeathed to his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. The collection was put up for auction in 1987, and was purchased by the De Beers Company, who placed it on permanent loan with The William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley.
A memorial exhibition in 1964 presented one hundred and fifty works: paintings in oils, watercolour and tempera, etchings, silverpoint, pen and pencil sketches, carvings and cameos. Speaking of his brother, Clifford Timlin offered glimpses of his “naturally – but only slightly temperamental” artistic sibling, who, in preparation for an exhibition, would shut himself away in his studio for two or three months straight to emerge at the end with 50 or 60 new works. The Ship That Sailed to Mars was one of his most absorbing occupations.
The William Humphreys Art Gallery today houses the largest public collection of Timlin’s work
****
Like Winnie the Pooh and the Hobbit, the Ship that Sailed to Mars was initially a bedtime story. Like them, it caught up its author and took on a life of its own. Two years of intense work transformed a family entertainment into 48 intricate watercolours accompanied by an equal number of elaborate calligraphies recounting the adventure of the Old Man who, with the help of fairies, builds a ship and sails to Mars.
Timlin sent the project to London publisher George G. Harrap and Company Limited, who had a long-standing reputation for publishing lavish illustrated books with the best illustrators of the day. Apparently eager to find a successor for Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogány, George Harrap enthusiastically agreed to publish the book without typesetting. Timlin’s watercolours and calligraphic pages were reproduced, hand-mounted on grey art paper, and bound. The Ship That Sailed to Mars was published in November 1923, priced at five guineas. George Harraps’ enthusiasm, though, was well tempered with business acumen; Timlin paid for half the production costs. Only 2000 copies were printed, of which 250 were distributed in America by Stokes of New York in 1924, selling at twelve dollars each.
There was no second edition, no reprints or newly assembled and bound copies, after that first and only print run of 2000 books. In 1927, Timlin embarked on another book, for which he completed the text, entitled The Building of the Fairy City. By this time, his popularity was such that acquaintances and friends clamoured to be able to purchase the original watercolours. He sold many on the understanding that the pictures would be made available when the time came to publish the book, but some buyers were subsequently reluctant and Timlin lost track of the others, so he began painting a new set, only to die before it was completed.
****
In every way, The Ship that Sailed to Mars is a book unique. Neither science fiction nor fairy tale, neither for children nor for adults, a hint of this true originality can already be glimpsed on the title page. Subtitled “A Fantasy”, the story is “Told and Pictured by William M. Timlin”.
At first glance, this might well appear a stilted and precious choice of terms, rather than the conventional “written and illustrated”. Nevertheless, a story “told” implies that the author is not necessarily making it up, but conferring the authority of the realm of the oft-told tale, where the storyteller is a mediator, not an author. “Told” hints at archetypes, not simply fiction. It is a common enough device in modern fantasy, but Timlin employs it here implicitly, in passing, easily overlooked. “Pictured” removes all notion of subservience of image to text, the tale appears to the teller as much in images as in words. Neither takes precedence, painting and prose offer simultaneous versions – a telling and a picturing – in parallel. It is quite difficult, if not impossible, to tell which came first in every episode, word or image, so intertwined is the genesis of the two.
The tone of Timlin’s telling is also far removed from common storybook fare. It is not self-consciously medievalist, like Howard Pyle’s Arthurian cycle, nor sweetly condescending, as were many edifying stories written to children early in the century. It is more closely reminiscent of Howard P. Lovecraft’s novella “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” than of the nursery (although Timlin has nothing of Lovecraft’s foreboding cosmicism). The text is strangely distant and dreamlike, despite Timlin’s elegant touches of humour, but nevertheless allows the author the occasional grim observation of the unenviable state of mankind. Essentially, it is the story of an outcast, the Old Man who builds the Ship.
There are other Old Men in myth and literature, from the Wandering Jew to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. More often than not, these Old Men are personifications of fate; Timlin’s Old Man, who “had not always been old, and in his dim, forgotten youth, he had said ‘I will go to Mars; sailing by way of the Moon, and the more friendly planets” is very different. He is an uncomplaining dreamer, whose response to the world’s wickedness is to withdraw into the workshop in his back garden.
The Ship that Sailed to Mars is certainly not science-fiction; science plays little part. The Ship’s sails are filled with fairy winds, not solar impulses, and indeed the solar system owes far far more to myth than to astronomy. Timlin places in the mouths of scientists and astronomers only scornful phrases and numbers destined to daunt, not elucidate: “But those around him, Scientists and Astronomers some, cried out in scorn, “Have we not ever taught you that Mars is thirty thousand miles away, and nothing could ever live on a journey there?’ And they left him, muttering in their beards as they went, for they had no faith, nor any belief, in Fairies.”
Timlin contents himself with only a few planets amongst those known to the ancients, but the route towards Mars also contains the Star of Classic Myths, where Medea enjoys a docile retirement and where Orpheus and Eurydice live happily reunited; the Pirates Planet, the Seven Sisters, the Sorrowful Planet and others either visited or glimpsed. There are dangers too, a meteor (“a giant spark from the Anvil of some Industrious God who was forging, maybe, an iron circlet for the ankle of his Beloved”), and the Eden Serpent, a gigantic ophidian with jewels for eyes and a many-fingered tongue, a Biblical intruder into classical myth, cast out of Paradise and now haunting the depths of space.
Other passages could have been penned by H. P. Lovecraft: “Once the fiery breath of that One whose Name is shuddered at on Earth, and whispered to-and-fro on dark and windy nights, nearly engulfed the Ship, and shrivelled it in the cascading flames that ascended from its myriad eyes and mouths. His horrible spouse, that evil that had troubled men through all the fabled days, wallowed at his side, and adding her voice to his, shrieked in maniac rage her hatred of mankind.” Timlin’s cosmic pantheon is a personal cornucopia of classical myth, folklore and intimate nostalgia; the god Pan sends along two gifts for the fairies of Mars, one of which is “the quickening joy of an English Spring”.
When the Old Man arrives at his destination, amongst the wonders of the City of Mars, (built by fairies who had fled first the Earth, then the Moon when this satellite became cold) it is to find a classic folk tale of love and longing: a sorrowful princess mourning her lost prince. The Old Man resolves to set things aright, and, journeying on dragonback (still wearing his carpet slippers!) far over the dark forests of Mars to the Thunder City in the Iron Hills, finds the Prince in the grip of the Misery that continual storms inflict on the listless inhabitants. The Old Man, with his earthly knowledge of electricity, constructs a lightning rod, which draws away the storms, and the prince, released from his melancholy, returns to the City, where he and the Princess are reunited. “…the Tower with its head amongst the Lightnings became the wonder-sight of that mysterious world, - and strange indeed it seems to us that the most fairylike thing in that Land of Fairies should be a monument built by a Man.”
The Old Man does not return to Earth. (Only a farmer had even noticed his departure, as the fairies embarked one of his cows, along with a swath of meadow in tow behind the Ship, to have fresh milk for the journey, prompting him to consider the “portentous step of Writing to the Newspaper.”) The epilogue tells us that the last fairies of the Earth finally build a ship of their own and quit the Earth. Magic has definitively deserted our planet. (In this sense, Timlin rejoins Tolkien, who suggests that in poetry, art and music lie the faint glimmerings of a lost Elven heritage.) Timlin hints at further adventures for the Old Man, but they remained unwritten.
****
As a most curiously fitting postscript, film rights to Timlin’s book were purchased by a Hollywood studio, and not just any studio, but none other than Paramount Pictures. In the March 1926 issues of Photoplay and Motion Picture Classic, Paramount announced the release of The Ship That Sailed to Mars. In April, the title had been changed to Get Off the Earth, starring Raymond Griffith. The announcement shows Griffith in his signature costume – top hat, spats and tails – lightly gripping the stern rail of a sailing ship hurtling heavenward towards the Red Planet, which serves as a backdrop for several maidens in pure 20’s modern damsel-in-distress dishabille. A vignette lower right shows him giving its comeuppance to a dinosaur-like monster that squeals and squints in dismay as Griffith energetically corkscrews its tail. (Both images are liberally inspired by Timlin’s artwork.) The accompanying texts gushes: “The sensational comedy novelty of 1926 from The Ship that Sailed to Mars by W.M. Timlin. The high hat comedian absolutely tops everything he has ever done in his life before in this startling surprise offering! Hurrying down Fifth Avenue, New York, to his wedding, Raymond suddenly spins right off the earth up into a dizzy but delightful paradise of beautiful damsels, monstrous-sized animals and more fun than twenty everyday worlds like ours! Of course Raymond comes back to earth and marries the girl but—!”
Griffith was a sensation of the silent era, though sadly today he is almost completely forgotten. Contemporary of Timlin, born into a theatre family, he lost his voice in childhood to respiratory diphtheria (the loss being the result of a too-vigorous scream during a play, as Griffith himself liked to relate, is almost certainly apocryphal), and could not speak above a hoarse whisper. Abandoning the stage (he had already played the lead in Little Lord Fauntleroy at the age of seven) young Griffith joined a circus, did a brief stint in the Navy, and eventually found himself in Hollywood. He starred in Cecil B. DeMille’s Changing Husbands, and was acclaimed in Paths to Paradise in 1925. Screenland magazine confidently predicted he would be the next Charlie Chaplin. In an unabashed blurb for an upcoming comedy entitled Fresh Paint, Paramount declared: “RAYMOND GRIFFITH has reached the point now where they start laughing as soon as his name is flashed on the screen. That means real money at the box office. Griffith has a big de luxe staff of directors, writers, cameramen and technicians of all kinds doing nothing but devising ideas and working on Griffith comedies. The result is that every Griffith picture now is a big comedy special presenting the new favorite plus the best in story material and invention that brains and money can secure…” Unfortunately, 1927 passed the pitiless judgment of the box office – declining ticket sales - and Griffith and Paramount parted company. The advent of the “talkies” was the end of his acting career. Paradoxically, his last - and unaccredited – screen appearance, in All Quiet on the Western Front as the mute French soldier stabbed by Lew Ayres, who then shares a foxhole with him as he slowly dies, is one of the most harrowing and memorable of movie history. After that, Griffith became a production supervisor and associate producer. He died in 1957.
One wonders what William Timlin must have thought of the whole episode; perhaps it came and went so quickly that by the time he was notified, it was already over. Luckily for him, the film was never made; it’s not difficult to imagine his dismay, or at very best, his stoical indifference, had the film been completed. Griffith and his “big de luxe staff” would have joyfully mauled and dismembered the story in pure Hollywood style, a clumsy caricature of a dreamlike fable. Oblivion is undoubtedly preferable to such dubious posterity.
****
Perhaps Timlin’s convictions are most clearly expressed in the unexpected intrusions of ugliness that rear their heads in the form of monsters wallowing and flopping in the oozing swamp, in the “Industrious God” with his mind more on manacles than romance, in the sudden contradictions to the whimsical lightness of the book. Timlin’s fairy story is akin to those of the Brothers Grimm, where meaningful evil and danger are always lurking, always reminders of the duality that fantasy’s role is to remind us of, the diametrically opposed sides of human nature. In the same fashion that the cautionary symbolism of the careful harvest of “stories told” by Brothers Grimm, once so clear, (before being misunderstood although thankfully preserved in print), lost much meaning until Bettelheim carefully explained them to modern society, Timlin’s tale is far more than simple entertainment, it is part of the continuing and vital voice of fable. It exemplifies the value of fantasy and the wherewithal of whimsy, although we adults, minds often clouded by adult things, must look very hard to perceive them.
Timlin’s voice speaks through the Old Man, with his sour view of Science versus Art, of how Science deludes with a need to diminish and dissect through the use of figures and factual analysis, dissipating and dispelling the miracle and the magic of worlds. The Old Man is “old” in being out-of-step with current ideology, still clinging to his dream of wonder, but choosing exile to rediscover it. The flight to Mars of a fugitive reveals Earth as the alien environment, unbalanced by the dominance of science and rational modernity. Timlin’s now-vanished fairy turrets and dragons in the Colosseum clearly show his desire to help people rediscover the enchantment of childhood, which he assumed they had lost but still needed somewhere in their lives. Timlin’s work is a reminder of our need for balance, and our inability to achieve it.
Where to place William M. Timlin in the pantheon of late 19th and early 20th century illustrators? Oft-cited Richard Dalby in The Golden Age of Children’s Book Illustration describes The Ship That Sailed to Mars as “the most original and beautiful children’s book of the 1920s.” Timlin’s illustrations are rightly compared to those of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. His masterful use of composition can only be compared to W. Russell Flint’s Morte d’Arthur. His architectures rival the best work of Sidney Sime and his monstrous creatures would not be out of place in the work of José Segrelles. Only the rarity and singular nature of his unique book wrongly deprives him of a more ample – and amply merited - entry in the who’s who of 20th century illustrators. This edition, published nearly ninety years after the original, repairs at least in part that omission, with the rediscovery of Timlin’s timeless and visionary talent.
NOTES:
1. Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society 1880s-1960s by Clive Chipkin, September 1993, David Philip, Publishers
Thanks to Neil Fraser, Herbert Prins, Bruce Calvert and particularly to Hesta Maree of the William Humphrey Art Gallery, for their gracious and precious help. Special thanks to Ann Carling.
****
THE SHIP THAT SAILED TO MARS
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Calla Editions (October 20, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1606600176
ISBN-13: 978-1606600177
Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.8 x 1.3 inches
For more information, visit Jeff Menges’ excellent blog V.I.E.W.
Posted by John on 15/10/11 | 07:00 PM | Chronicles
~ THE DEFINING OF DREAMS ~
Women of the Golden Age of Illustration: Florence Harrison
“The chief obstacle to a woman’s success is that she can never have a wife. Just reflect what a wife does for an artist.” 1
~~~
“I see a little girl sitting on the grass, beneath the limes in the hot summer-tide, with eyes fixed on the far away blue hills, and seeing who knows what shapes there; for the boy by her side is reading to her wondrous stories of knight and lady, and fairy thing, that lived in the ancient days…” 2
~~~
“There is no earthly reason why women should not be illustrators.” 3
~~~
The era regarded as the Golden Age of Illustration (from the mid-19th century to the beginning of World War II, with a particular flowering between 1905 and 1914) was awash with notable names ~ Dulac, Detmold, Nielsen, Pogány; the Robinson brothers, and of course, Arthur Rackham. In the shadow of the most renowned, there are those who sank all too soon into sad (and unwarranted) obscurity. One wonders why the likes of Harry Clarke, Sidney Sime and Thomas Mackenzie did not achieve the comparative and continuing fame of, for example, Aubrey Beardsley, who by contrast left such a substantial body of instantly recognizable work despite the hectic brevity of his lifespan.
But what of the women, oft-encountered but too frequently forgotten pioneers of the feminine in this particular field of art? Despite the undoubted prestige accorded to the more popular personages ~ Beatrix Potter and Kate Greenaway being amongst the most enduring examples of their profession ~ there existed a positive profusion of more elusive, and arguably more fascinating, characters.
The painterly watercolours of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale are second to none, especially none of her masculine peers. Wife of ceramicist William, the artist Evelyn de Morgan deserves equal billing with Burne-Jones, Virginia Frances Sterrett holds her own against Kay Neilson, but is practically unknown. The flowing Art Nouveau figures of the enigmatic Florence Harrison, and the Pre-Raphaelite poetry of her depictions, open a doorway into a world of women whose exquisite talents found expression in illustrating a cornucopia of well-loved fables & fairy tales.
Their work reflects a wonderful richness that enhanced editions of the most popular literature of the age, despite the necessary restraints of producing faithful rendition of an established story or poem in specific stages of the narrative that may have curtailed the fullness of their own flights of fancy. Arthurian legend was a much sought-after subject, whether bringing added life to Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”, or depicting the heroes & heroines who inhabited ornate early works of William Morris. Harrison, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors left a lavish creative legacy that gives eloquent voice to the remarkable accomplishments of a fellowship of women whose light has been hidden for too long by the vagaries of fashionable taste.
The biographical notices of long-deceased illustrators are often dry affairs. Born. Died. Active from/to… Published work in… (insert here a short list of yellowed and often unremembered magazines). Bibliography… (summary list of impossible-to-find titles here). End of story.
More space is naturally consecrated to the imagery, and indeed many seem to disappear behind their work, leading studious lives, abstemious and serious, retired or unassuming. Add to that the perennial modesty, especially at the eve of the Victorian Age, and there is little to say.
It is a shame. Naturally, there is more. All of these illustrators au feminin lived lives, with all the events, momentous and quotidian, that supposes. They all lived lives in a world governed, dominated and managed by men. (English does not even have, as does French, a feminine form for “illustrator”.) They lived in a world where Art was done by men. (How long after her unpardonable commitment to an asylum for the insane and her lonely death was Camille Claudel’s genius duly recognized?) In a world where what was said about Art was said by men, and history written by them, small wonder they faded so quickly and demurely into the background. Small wonder indeed:
“Let men busy themselves with all that has to do with great art. Let women occupy themselves with those types of art which they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits, and miniatures… To women, above all, falls the practice of the graphic arts, those painstaking arts which correspond so well to the role of abnegation and devotion which the honest woman happily fills here on earth.” — Léon Legrange in Gazette des beaux-arts, 1860
From left to right: The oft-perilous exercise of exhibiting at the grand Salons.
Cartoon by Phil May in Mr Punch in Bohemia, or The Lighter Side of Literary, Artistic and Professional Life, 1910(?) The Punch Library of Humour edited by J. A. Hammerton.
Far right: Non-identified artist’s print of Blackie & Son of Glasgow. The main Glasgow printing works. Stanhope Street and the old Villafield Press.
Agnes C. Blackie dates this as c. 1892 in Blackie & Son. 1809-1959. A Short History of the Firm (1959).
Walter Crane, in his comprehensive essay “Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New”, first published in 1896, mentions only a few female illustrators, and that in passing and moreover only to underline their quaintness. (To be wholly unfair to Walter Crane - also in passing - perhaps his familiarity and ease with females and the female form dated from a century or two prior to that. Frederic Lord Leighton, is said to have exclaimed before Crane’s “The Renaissance of Venus”, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877: “But my dear fellow, that is not Aphrodite, that is Alessandro!” Unable to avail himself of a female model, judged unacceptable by his wife, Crane had fallen back on one of the more popular Italian male models who were in vogue in London.)
To revisit the Victorian Age’s almost pathological attitude to the nude would be to belabour a horse long dead and buried, but the reluctance to expose delicate feminine constitutions to the male nude resulted in effectively disbarring women from formal art training. Progressive institutions, such as the Pennsylvania Academy, which attempted to promote equal treatment of male and female students could come under harsh fire. In Europe, prominent art schools did not provide women’s classes with a nude model until close to the turn of the century. The concern over the nude model can be illustrated by letters which the Pennsylvania Academy received from irate male observers, which expressed that the students’ fragile feminine natures “were violated by contact with… degraded women and the sight of nude males in the stifling heat of the Life Class.” Although women finally gained (marginal) access to academies in the 1860’s, they were not allowed to so much as glimpse male models. (Consider this: it was only in 1882 that the Married Women’s Property Act was passed in the British Parliament. Prior to that, upon marriage, all a woman’s property was transferred automatically to her husband’s control. Women had much to fight for.) No access to male models meant that history and mythology, considered the most exalted and noble subjects of the day, were beyond their grasp.
Parallel to this, a flood of art manuals “suitable” for female sensibilities did their best to maintain a status quo, and keep women artists occupied, lest they be tempted to adventure into realms deemed unfit for them.
Woman must confine herself to those subjects which are allied to her sphere… children, animals, fruit, flowers, etc. But when a woman desires to paint large-sized pictures, she is…lost. — Marie-Élisabeth Boulanger Cavé, Drawing from Memory, 1868
It all paints a bleak picture of the opportunities for women in art. But suppose they should by sheer force of will, clear all these hurdles, would their art be appreciated objectively, judged for what it was worth, or discounted because it was by a woman’s hand? Chances are the latter would be the case.
At the risk of lifting words out of context and not being able to supply a representative range of opinions, here are (quite) a few lines from The Gentleman’s Magazine. The article, written in the fall of 1893, and signed Sylvanus Urban, is entitled “Woman’s Place in Art” and if you’ll pardon the length, it seems appropriate to reproduce a substantial portion. Sylvanus Urban was apparently the pen name adopted by the editors of The Gentleman’s Magazine (created in 1731 by Edward Cave, the first person to use the word “magazine” to describe a periodical), one of the most influential publications of its time. (The missing fragments of the first three phrases in the second section are, alas, absent from the scan of the article available on line.)
Are women artistically inferior to men? Here is a question that
gallantry predisposes one to answer in the negative. Some-
thing might even be urged in favour of such a response. Not until
recently have we given woman the independence and education
which foster the highest development of intellect. Professor Ferrero,
however, in the ‘‘New Review,” will have no coquetting with the
subject, and says that the existence of this inferiority on the part of
women is self-evident He brings once more forward the well-known
and often repeated facts that ” although there is hardly a woman of
a certain degree of refinement who cannot play one or more instru-
ments, yet there is not one who can claim to be a composer of
genius.” In literature they may claim Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, George Sand, George Eliot, &c, but in the figurative arts
“Sekani, Maraini, and Rosa Bonheur about exhaust the list.”
Besides a general lack of the creative power in art, women, according
to the Professor, do not even understand physical beauty, and
“remain cold, not only before a Venus of Medici, but, which is
stranger still, before an Apollo Belvedere, of which famous statue a
lady not very long ago could find no more appropriate remark to
make than that the face bore a striking resemblance to her hall-porter.”
This is one of the cruellest cuts ever dealt to the fair sex. To be
sure, the story concerning the lady does not count for much. One
is not typical of all. I could, moreover, find many masculine utter-
ances which would serve as parallels. I am not even prepared to
accept as generally true the statement that women do not understand
physical beauty.
Causes of Her Alleged Inferiority.
I SHOULD not have reopened a controversy…
I not wished to draw attention to the…
asserted inferiority. The primary…
lie in the sensual coldness of women as compared with men.” This,
too, is a hard saying. Once more, too, the question arises, Is it true?
If so, the general theories concerning women that have been advanced
by men are worthless. Beginning with early literature and mythology,
and progressing down to to-day, I find that men have been wont to
regard passion as a gift accorded to women in larger measure than
to men. I need not refer with Mr. Swinburne to “The Maenad and
the Bassarid.” I will only ask if any lines of Byron are better known
than those in which he compares the love of man as of itself “a thing
apart” with woman’s, which is “her whole existence.” The subject
is one I scarcely care to follow out. I do not, however, think that
the Professor’s theory is so well established as to justify any serious
deductions from it. A second reason for inferiority is said to be the
comparative rarity in woman of ‘’ the synthetic faculty, which in its
most exalted manifestations becomes genius.” A third is the weak-
ness of woman’s muscular structure, and the fact that her muscular
sensations are consequently less intense. She takes less part in the
great struggle for existence, and, consequently, ” feels in a less degree
the tragic emotions of life.” Destined ‘‘by Nature for the part of
nurse in the battle of life, she cannot adequately and with full power
depict its passionate and bloody episodes.”
Provinces in Art Woman Can Command.
In matters where mere prettiness is concerned the Professor finds
in woman a lively appreciation and a fair inventive faculty.
She will prefer a Watteau to a Michelangelo, a Coppée to a Dostojew-
ski, for ” the reason that graceful objects awaken by association a
number of those gentle images which repose in the mind of every
woman, especially if she be a mother, and cause her to worship in
ecstasy before the graces of a baby.” Further into this question I
cannot go. I have not been intentionally unjust to the writer, and
have, so far as I am able, given his exact words. Deprived of their
context, and the explanations afforded, they are not, of course, the
same thing. It is, however, impossible to force into a few sentences
matter that occupies the whole of a thoughtful and intelligent, if not
quite convincing, essay. Not wholly condemnatory of woman’s
art work is the essayist. In the imitatory arts, such as dramatic repre-
sentation, they excel. The names of celebrated actresses are much
more numerous than those of great actors. Here, again, I am at
issue with him. In the primitive arts concerned with the adornment
of the person, of weapons and vases, and the decoration of dwellings,
woman has taken up the place vacated by men. In regard to cos-
tume, some enthusiasm even is shown, and some dresses are said to
be “really genial creations.” Other artistic matters are said to be
within woman’s reach, and the art of conversation is declared to be
specially her province. In this ” woman has always been a queen,
from the time of the Greeks, when the celebrated courtesans kept
around them almost a Court of illustrious men, down to the last cen-
tury, when the flower of French intelligence assembled in the salons
of Madame de Longueville or Mademoiselle d’Epinay.”
Difference of Mental Conditions between the Sexes.
I SHALL not dream of impugning the gallantry of the Professor, nor
will I dispute all his premises. In a sense, what he says is true.
The same delicacy of constitution that has prevented woman from
taking part, as a rule, in war or the chase has debarred her from com-
peting with men in other fields. It may at once be admitted that women
can no more point to a Homer, a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Rabelais, a
Goethe, than they can to a Julius Caesar, a Marlborough, or a Nelson.
It is not, however, easily conceivable that they should. Without
being consciously repressed by men, they have, until recent days, been
discouraged from competition with men, In the case of a few women,
as Queen Elizabeth, Lady Jane Grey, and so forth, an education
advanced in some respects has been assigned them. Nine-tenths of
the women alive at this moment even obtain no education whatever,
and over immense districts they are mere household drudges, or
ministers to masculine pleasure. It is too early as yet to see what
will be the result of the species of academic training now, for the first
time, brought within the reach of any considerable section of woman-
hood. We are not yet far advanced in the study of heredity, and we
know not how long it may be before woman throws off the influences
of centuries of restriction, or before man generously reconciles him-
self to find in woman a competitor as well as a companion, an equal
instead of a subordinate.
The article is even more pernicious as it tries to appear balanced and fair, solicitous and respectful. Small wonder that the women who left their names in art were truly exceptional. (An aside: the article was written nearly five centuries - half a millennium - after these words: “If it were customary to send little girls to school and to teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.” - Christine de Pisan, Cité des Dames, 1405)
Some influential figures did have progressive views; John Ruskin is a prime example, but they were largely voices in a wilderness of genteel condescendence and smug hypocrisy.
We may also lay the blame on a falling-out-of-fashion of the texts they illustrated – Morris and Tennyson no longer appeal to the general public, and are rarely read for pleasure, or outside of university seminars, and by readers whose focus is on pure literature, not on the dated chemistry of word and image. And, to remove the illustrations themselves from their context, although galleries of imagery are an acceptable option, is to isolate them irremediably from the context in which they were conceived, viewed and appreciated.
Their value, though, remains intact, and enhanced by that otherworldliness of a glimpse into another time and place. In the words of Baudelaire: “the best account of a work of art could be another work of art, a poem or a piece of prose…” Reversing that logic, the illustrations to stories and poems are by extension works of art in themselves, though the true appreciation of their worth is obscured to us, as we can no longer truly appreciate the poetry of the 19th century. But this is our shortcoming. Our modernity requires of us that we bridge those gaps if we wish to appreciate these works of art for what they are: glimpses into the thoughts and lives of the women who painted them.
To imagine the sheer quantity of illustrative and narrative art produced during the latter half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th is difficult today (although we ourselves feel bombarded by imagery of every sort). Periodicals, weeklies, the daily press – thousands of publications flourished, endured or vanished practically overnight. The Industrial Revolution witnessed the emergence of a literate middle class, and more importantly for the ancestors of today’s tradition of fantasy illustration, the emergence of the new nation-states sparked a renewal of interest for national epics, folktale and all things recounting the founding mythology of peoples.
All this meant an avid appetite on the part of the public, and ample opportunities – even for women – for illustrators of every genre. Illustration was also less a man’s exclusive territory, patrolled by the vocal and often vehement defenders or this or that genre, illustrators were less exposed to the public, and the working relations with publishers more discrete than exhibiting in the grand salons filled with madding crowds. An illustrator could be – as now - hard working and retiring, and could, in a sense, hide behind his or her work. Some ended up hiding very well.
~~~
FACTS
For a time it seemed that relatively little was known about the history of Florence Harrison herself. She is often confused with British landscape painter Emma Florence Harrison, whose similar name and overlapping career mean that the latter’s exhibited works at the Royal Academy, in 1887, 1890 and 1891 have in the past been wrongly attributed. A small selection of Florence Harrison’s work was included in an exhibition, The Last Romantics, at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 1989. The book published to coincide with the exhibition contained this short biographical note on the artist:
Emma Florence Harrison ~
active 1877-1925.
Working in London and an RA exhibitor 1887-91, Florence Harrison (as she is always known) is chiefly remembered for the type of book shown here, illustrated in an attractive late Pre-Raphaelite style especially indebted to Rossetti. She also illustrated books of verse by herself. According to Peppin and Micklethwait, her later work, published by Dent, is more conventional.4
All in all, it is a paltry paean, especially for someone whose draughts(wo)manship was far superior to Rossetti’s, despite her supposed debt to the former. Also, she never exhibited at the Royal Academy; the author mistakes her for the landscape painter.
Florence Harrison’s entry in Dictionary of British Book Illustrators: The Twentieth Century, by Brigid Peppin and Lucy Micklethwait (John Murray, London. 1983) is indeed succinct:
Worked as Florence Harrison. Children’s illustrator and verse writer. Her early work combines the influence of Art Nouveau with characterization similar to that of Randolph Caldecott. Later, when she was working for Dent, her drawings became more commonplace, ending as a pastiche of contemporary styles.
Any resemblance to Caldecott is purely in the eyes of Peppin and Micklethwait. (Some of her early work is more akin to that of Jessie M. King.) With all due respect, Harrison’s work is far more elegant, possesses a far greater depth of poetry and feeling and none of Caldecott’s tendency toward caricature - and even less of his muted palette. (Also, if I may be forgiven, what on earth is a “pastiche of contemporary styles”?) Once again, she is summed up and short-changed in one brief mention.
Alan Horne, in The Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators (1994) is nothing if not curt. (Emma) Florence Harrison’s life is resumed in two words: “See Houfe.” While he refers the reader to Simon Houfe’s “The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800-1914”, Florence Harrison’s flourishing dates – 1877 to 1925 - are borrowed from Peppin & Micklethwait (Houfe gives the dates of 1887 to 1914). Both are incorrect. Florence Harrison continued on with Blackie into the 30’s and with other publishers into the early 1940’s. One of her last published illustrations dates from 1941 and depicts a German warplane over London – a world far removed from Pre-Raphaelite shores.
Houfe’s dictionary was first published in 1978; a revised edition, with 250 supplementary entries, brings the number of artists to 2700, with a lengthy introduction to the world of the 19th-century illustrator. Sandwiched between Charles Harrison (black and white artist and cartoonist) and George L. Harrison (figure and domestic painter), the entry concerning Florence is not overly helpful:
Harrison, Emma Florence, fl.1887-1914
Figure painter and illustrator. She was working in London from 1887 and specialised in illustrating poetry and children’s books in a later Pre-Raphaelite style deriving something as well from William Morris.
Illus: In the Fairy Ring (1908), Poems of Christina Rossetti (1910), Guinevere (Tennyson, 1912), Early Poems of William Morris (1914). Exhib: RA 1887-91.
An Emma Florence Harrison was apparently also recorded as a student of the Glasgow School of Art, renowned for such alumni as the Macdonald sisters & Jessie M. King. The fabulously fluid style of her black & white drawings and page decorations certainly reflects a degree of similarity with the Glaswegian Art Nouveau design work of the period spanning the 1880s to the 1920s. Except Florence never attended Glasgow. The school confirms they have no record of her.
However, more recent research by Florence Harrison’s ipso facto biographer Mary Rosalind Jacobs5 has shed a good deal more light. Of known facts, there are indeed few, and they continue to be misconstrued. “By A Woman’s Hand: Illustrators of the Golden Age”, edited by Mary Carolyn Waldrep (Dover Publications, 2010) takes Mary Jacobs’ research into account, although still claims Florence Harrison exhibited at the Royal Academy in London (which would have put her first showing at the age of 10), as well as concluding that she was “an Australian artist.”
What Florence Harrison has bequeathed is not so much memorable moments of her life, but her beautiful imagery.
~~~
FRAGMENTS
Florence Harrison’s dedication to her mother in Elfin Song, 1912
AT SEA ~ The Distant Shores of Home
A little girl sits atop a rock. A wave sweeps past to froth in a crest behind; a ship with billowing sails follows the same swirling curve. A star appears in the sky directly overhead. The little girl holds a book or page in her hands, but she is not looking at it, she is gazing out to the sea we cannot see. A simple vignette; two scrolls announce in turn, in a stylish Art Nouveau script: “Dedication” and “To my mother”. The dedication appeared in “Elfin Song”, one of Florence Harrison’s first books, the only dedication she ever made.
According to Mary Rosalind Jacobs, the little girl is Florence, the rock is her mother, the ship her father and the star a reference to a maritime ancestor John Harrison, who was instrumental in the quest to accurately measure longitude.
The sea may have occupied a particular place in Florence’s life. Florence Susan Harrison was born aboard ship, on November 2nd, 1877. Florence’s father Norwood was Master Mariner and Captain of the clipper Windsor Castle, bound for Australia with 366 immigrants aboard. Florence was born while the ship was moored in Moreton Bay, just off the mouth of Brisbane River. The Brisbane Courier printed the birth announcement 6 days later, in its edition of November 8th, 1877. Florence was the second daughter of Norwood and Lucy Susan (née Thomas); an elder sister, Edith Alice, had been born in Eltham, Kent, eighteen months earlier. The Windsor Castle left Brisbane on December 8th, bound for London with a cargo of wood, tallow, meat, animal hides and timber and 36 passengers.
Harrisons appear in the British census of 1881, living in Folkestone, Kent. The address given is a boarding school for young girls, managed by her maiden aunt Elizabeth Harrison. There is no mention of Florence’s older sister, who might have died and been buried at sea. As Master Mariner and Captain, Norwood Harrison had the right to be accompanied by his family, and may have taken them on other voyages. The Harrisons are absent from the 1891 census, but 1901 finds Florence (now aged 23) living with her mother and two younger brothers, Arthur and Godfrey, in Leyton, East London. There is no mention of Norwood.
The dedication of Elfin Song, one of her early books, dates from 1912, the year her mother died. Perhaps the little girl is a daughter lost, left on the shore by a mother forever departed. The father may well be the ship, coming and going with the tide, rarely home. The star is perhaps the older sister Florence would never have known. It is the portrait of a person shipwrecked and alone on life’s shores…
Of course, it may be none of these things; the small drawing contains all the ambiguity of a voice gone silent, of a sign language whose meaning is lost.
~~~
Close-ups of Florence Harrison’s free and elegant brushwork.
Left: Illustration from the Rhyme of a Run, 1907
Centre: Illustration from Tennyson’s Mariana: “She wept, I am aweary….” 1912.
Right: Illustration from Tennyson’s Ulysses: “To Strive, to Seek, to Find and not to Yield.”, 1912.
All of these images have seen their values “pushed” in Photoshop, in order to make more clearly legible the retouching in gouache and to bring to the fore any hints of penciled underdrawing. Both are much less marked in the originals themselves.
AT WORK ~ Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Florence Harrison provided a great number of illustrations for the publisher Blackie and Sons, though other than statements of advances and royalties paid, we know nothing of her relationship with them. Nor do we know anything of her life as an illustrator: what her studio resembled, or her manner of working.
The closest glimpse that might be provided is through her originals. The printed illustrations, with their delicate washes, or the black and white plates, mask the energy and spontaneity of her line work, much of which appears to have been done with a brush. The originals are in no way studied and painstakingly executed, they retain much of the artist whose hand and brush find lines as they go. Areas have been painted over in white gouache – shadowy bluish pentimento apparent where the ink has crept upward through the paint over the years.
It’s not known what formal art training – if indeed any at all – Florence may have received. It’s unlikely she ever set foot in an art school, but if she did, her passage there has not yet come to light. Her draughtsmanship displays a natural ease and grasp of the human face and figure, the proportions are elegant, the gestures sure. She also excels at the abbreviated foreshortening inherent in the rendering of space with line and wash, especially in the portrait format most books require. Some of her perspectives and framed spaces are as audacious as those of Alma-Tadema. If she was entirely self-taught, then her accomplishments are all the more remarkable.
Did Florence travel to Glasgow regularly? Did she make her way through crowded platforms, portfolio under her arm, search for her seat, securely stow her precious paintings, vowing to make sure she did not forget them upon arriving in Scotland? Of all of the commonplace things every illustrator knows so well – the meetings, the moments when artwork is delivered and revealed to the publisher, the first copies of one’s own books in the post, glimpsing the books themselves in the shops – we have no trace. Of the trivialities of the profession – procuring paper, finding pigments and selecting brushes – we can only guess. (If you’ll pardon an aside, these are the things I can most easily picture, most completely imagine, and only because these very trivialities compose such a part of my own day. How ill-prepared we truly are to imagine lives long past.)
It’s tempting to speculate what the Rossettis, Tennysons and Morrises of this world would have thought of Florence Harrison’s work. Tennyson is said to have remarked, somewhat dismissively “The illustrator should always adhere to the words of the poet!” to Holman Hunt regarding the latter’s painting of The Lady of Shallot (completed 1905), which he felt did not depict his poetic intentions.
According to George Somes Layard, in “Tennyson and his Pre-Raphaelite illustrators”, (Elliot Stock, London, 1894), that particular sally must have been an exception:
“And this reminds me, in passing, of the curious indifference which Tennyson seems…to have manifested towards the pictorial and plastic arts. How different, for example, is this quiet submission to the independent pictorial treatment of his literary creations, without hint or interference on his part, to the wild excitement and fevers into which Dickens used to work himself over the illustrations to his novels!
…it will be remembered, he wrote to Forster: ‘Good heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong… I can’t say what pain and vexation it is to be so utterly misrepresented. I would cheerfully have given a hundred pounds to keep this illustration out of the book.’ This was but one of many such outbursts. But how far otherwise it is with Tennyson! Any objection that he did make… was of the practically useless ex post facto kind. Nor was it only in the matter of illustrations to his own work that he seems to have been unconcerned and incurious, but he appears to have through life manifested a general insensibility to pictorial art, which strikes one at first as something more than remarkable. The story is well known of Lord John Russell coming up to him, on his return from Italy, and asking how he had enjoyed the pictures and works of art in Florence. ‘I liked them very much’, said Tennyson, ‘but I was bothered because I could not get any English tobacco for love or money. A lady told me I could smuggle some from an English ship if I heavily bribed the Custom-house officers; but I didn’t do that, and came away.’ ”
While akin in spirit to the Pre-Raphaelites of more than half a century before, Florence Harrison’s work is resolutely “illustrative” and not “decorative”, a theme dear to the heart of Walter Crane, who dismissed any artist he felt lavished too much attention on the former to the detriment of the latter. (Crane also dismissed all illustrations that were not English, unless he felt the occasional foreigner had successfully assimilated British values.)
According to Debra N. Mancoff, in “The Arthurian Revival in Victorian Art” “Harrison drew upon the full repertoire of recent illustration: medievalized borders and medallions echoing the Kelmscott style, attenuated and posturing figures in chapter headings reminiscent of King’s embellishments, bizarre foliate forms inspired by Beardsley, black-and-white full-page reproductions suggesting a romantic vision of medieval woodcuts, and glowing full-page color plates recalling the late Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic.”
Florence Harrison has largely discarded William Morris’ heavy florid floral curlicues that framed his Arthurian illustrations and endured in less attractive forms for generations of publishers to come, she reserves her decorative flourishes for vignettes and headers, rarely putting more than a simple rule around her illustrations. Her modernism is contained in her shedding of decorative convention, and a concentration on simple line and image.
In “Illustrating Camelot” by Barbara Tepa Lupack with Alan Lupack, her line work is aptly compared to that of Jessie M. King, although “Harrison’s penwork was not nearly as fine as King’s, and her designs were not nearly as intricate.” Perhaps this equally helps explain the enduring of Jessie M. King’s work and the fading of Florence Harrison’s: the former is still admired for aesthetic qualities independently of the theme illustrated, whereas the popularity of Florence’s work has declined with that of her authors.
~~~
Illustration for “Summer Dawn”, from The Early Poems of William Morris, 1914
IN BOHEMIA ~ A short stay in the artist’s studio
What were her relations to her peers; painters and illustrators? For a time, during 1928 and 1929, Florence Harrison’s address is given as The Studio, 47 Redcliffe Road, South Kensington. In the Victorian era and early decades of the twentieth century, South Kensington & Chelsea apparently became both home and workplace for an ever-changing fraternity of male and female artists. Several prominent painters, including members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, appear to have stayed in the vicinity at some point, taking studios as well as private houses.
Arthur Ransome, in his anecdotal “Bohemia in London”, (1907) recalled in the chapter “Old and New Chelsea” that when Rossetti came to live at number 16 Cheyne Walk nine months after the death of his wife Lizzie Siddal, “In the back garden he kept all manner of strange beasts – zebus, armadillos, and the favourite of all, the wombat, an animal almost canonised by the Pre-Raphaelites.”
Following this tradition, it is known that amongst the number of later residents were several women sculptors who occupied studios in Redcliffe Road (numbers 12, 52 and 23 circa 1915-16,1922-23 & 1931-32 respectively). It is also recorded that the painter, illustrator and graphic artist Edward Bawden (1903-1989) lived at number 58 in the late twenties, along with the watercolourist and wood engraver Eric Ravilious and Scottish painter Douglas Percy Bliss, who shared a studio there in 1925 whilst in their final year at the Royal College of Art.
~~~
Cover illustration from The Man in the Moon (Blackie & Son Limited,1918) and “Winter and Windy-Weather”, printed in the 1922 Blackie’s Girls’ Annual
ABROAD ~ Make-Believe in Bruges
The records of Blackie’s show that monies owed to Florence were sent to Bruges from 1908 to 1914, and again from 1918 to 1920. (One has to assume that the break between those dates was caused by the onset and duration of the Great War.) What took her to Bruges? (And what took her back there again, to a Belgium devastated by the war?) Perhaps contacts established during her years at her aunt’s boarding school, where many of the pupils and teachers came from France and Belgium. Did she learn French or perhaps Flemish? Did she admire the work of the Flemish painters of the late Middle Ages: Memling, Bouts or Van Der Goes, or did she prefer to them the Symbolists Khnopff, Levy-Dhurmer, Delville or Degouve de Nunques, the world of Bruges-la-Morte?
Bruges appears in many of her illustrations, transformed by the artist into a medieval town out of time, recognizably far from British shores. Florence Harrison captures the Gothic verticality of Bruges as well as the calmer lines of the canals flanked by convents. Some of her storybook children sport wooden shoes and Netherlandish coifs and dresses, but otherwise, for the time being at least, her life in Bruges remains a mystery. She would certainly have been well acquainted with the architecture of the almshouses and guildhalls, the cobbled streets and the canals. Bruges is a romantic northern Venice even now, despite the hordes of eager tourists and sightseeing boats. In Florence’s day, it would have been an illustrator’s paradise of inspiration. No wonder Flanders appears in her paintings.Perhaps her own apparently self-reliant spirit was drawn to the beguinage, once the home of lay sisters who chose not to take holy orders but instead retained a certain degree of independence. The exact location of her own lodgings, however, remains elusive.
~~~
“..it was their last hour,
A madness of farewells.”
From Tennyson’s “Guinevere and Other Poems”, Blackie & Son, Glasgow, 1912
AT HEART ~ Romance and fantasy
Although Florence Harrison breathed such passionate life into Arthurian romance, she concealed her own equally well. She would have been of those generations who saw husbands and beaux march off during the First World War, many never to return. Admittedly, she was illustrating the romantic fantasies of others’ lives and imaginations, and so managing to conceal, or choosing not to reveal, her own. Impossible not to wonder how much it was about herself and her own vision, perhaps in her heart she was thinking or imagining or dreaming just as William Morris was idealizing love. In the absence of words of her own, it is unlikely that we will ever know.
~~~
“Rise up, and look and listen, Galahad”
From “Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery”, published in “The Early Poems of William Morris”. Blackie & Son Ltd. 1914
AT HEART ~ A Change of Faith
It may have been in Bruges that Florence Harrison began her conversion to Catholicism. What motivated her conversion is a mystery, but it may have been the result of her friendship with fellow convert Enid M. Dinnis (1875-1942), who she met in Bruges. Florence provided many illustrations for Dinnis’ texts from 1927 onwards, notably for the American National Catholic review The Sign. Whether for religious or economic reasons, the editors of The Sign demanded that all work be done in pen and ink. Florence’s work, which had before been characterized by her beautiful palette, was now reduced to a somber and strict black and white. Her final illustration for Dinnis was published in the July 1943 issue of The Sign, accompanying the final page of a story entitled “Dinah’s Fairy Godmother”, which was discovered in Dinnis’ typewriter after her death.
In a way, Florence Harrison’s oeuvre mirrors a changing world, from the vivid Indian summer of the romantic Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite eras to a world drained of colour and joy by the tragedy of two world wars.
~~~
“She stood on inner ground that budded flowers.”
From “Poems by Christina Rossetti”, Blackie & Son, 1910
AT REST ~ An Unmarked Grave on the South Coast
With the advent of World War II, Florence fled London to the safety of a rented flat in East Sussex, where she lived with her cousin Mary Isobel Harrison in Hove, just to the west of Brighton. Mary died in 1943; Florence continued to live at the same address. She succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 78, on January 5th, 1955.
Florence Harrison is buried in an unmarked grave in Hove Cemetery. Her last will requested that her cat be humanely disposed of, and bequeathed her modest possessions to members of her family and to friends.
Lingering over the lengthy bibliography, it’s impossible not to reflect on the givers of the books as gifts, the small and eager hands leafing through the pages of story & rhyme; educational and “Reward” books, as some were called, to encourage excellence; volumes of Pre-Raphaelite poetry and verse; all enhanced and indeed made memorable by the luxuriant imagery which flowed from Florence’s own elegant vision.
Those who bestowed these treasures, those who eagerly received and enjoyed them, all are gone long ago, as Florence herself. Now there are only the tattered picture books, filled with the glowing lines of an almost forgotten hand. But beyond the figure in a faded photograph, in portraits of glimmering beauty and enchantment her creative spirit endures.
Perhaps the conclusion to any attempt to breathe life into the biography of Florence Harrison might be left to William Morris, with a few lines from his epic poem, written in 1868-70, “The Earthly Paradise”:
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme;
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate;
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
~~~~~~~~~
THE FLORENCE HARRISON ENIGMA
Much of what is known about Florence Harrison would not be known at all were it not for the diligent efforts of a one person. Single-handedly, Mary Jacobs has set the official record straight and unearthed most of the few facts that make up her fragmentary biography. Without her dogged sleuthing, an article such as this would never have been possible. Mary has very kindly consented to say a few words about her fascination for Florence Harrison’s life and work.
“Although I had always been fond of poetry and long admired the works of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, it was only when my children had left for University that I could begin to devote more time to matters outside the home. Visits to Art Galleries enabled me to understand who they were and to begin to appreciate the beauty of the works of such artists as Rossetti and Burne-Jones.
During a visit to an antiques fair in 2005, I came across a vellum-covered book containing stunning illustrations by a previously unheard-of artist named Florence Harrison. The asking price was far above what I had ever considered paying for any book at that time, so I contented myself with making a mental note of her name in an attempt to discover more about the mysterious figure whose works seemed so spectacularly to capture the essence of the Pre-Raphaelites, but whose name had never featured in any of the books I had previously read on the subject. If only I could have read the poems and shown the vibrant pictures to my children whilst they were growing up !
The sources I consulted all said the same thing “Little is known about her except that her full name was Emma Florence Harrison who studied in Glasgow and had exhibited at The Royal Academy between 1887 and 1891”. Such was my enthusiasm and admiration for her works that, armed with this information, I began a diligent search for the elusive artist in census records and Glasgow University archives. I quickly established that no such person had ever been a student there, but was able to consult what remained of the publisher Blackie’s records for whom she had worked, held in the same building. This in turn led to a trip - albeit unproductive - to Bruges where she had apparently spent some time working.
Census records enabled me to expand upon the bare details of her family background and history, and eventually to set up a website devoted to her life and works. In the meantime I had managed to acquire many hundreds of her original drawings and had assembled a comprehensive library of books containing her work.
Imagine my astonishment when, a bare ten days after going live on the internet, I received a message from Sydney, Australia saying that my information was incorrect and that it was a case of mistaken identity. My informant was the last remaining family member of the real artist Florence Susan Harrison who they said was still alive in 1953 when they had last paid a visit to England. Their claims proved to be accurate and I was thus able to renew my research, this time from a position of knowledge.
What had begun as just one small part of my life, soon turned into an all-consuming effort to ensure that Florence’s true worth could be recognised by those with an interest in illustrators of the early 20th century. To this date, the previous inaccuracies are still being repeated by Galleries, Auction Houses and Dealers, but thanks in great measure to help from several influential and like-minded people, her true identity is gradually achieving a greater audience and becoming accepted as fact.
From those early beginnings of merely personal interest, I now find myself having become a focal point for those interested in her life and works. May she now take her place alongside her other gifted contemporaries and be accorded the long overdue recognition she deserves.”
MRJ -29/8/11
~~~~~~~~~
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Florence Harrison’s most prolific publishing partnership was with the Scottish firm Blackie & Son Limited, and much of her work spans several decades of prodigious output for them. Apart from her own books, she also illustrated story and verse for some of the well-known children’s writers of that era.
1905
Rhymes and Reasons by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1905).
1907
The Rhyme of a Run and Other Verse by Florence Harrison. Blackie & Son Limited, London. nd (1907).
Blackie’s Children’s Annual. London: Blackie and Son Ltd., MCMVIII.
Includes an illustrated verse by Florence.
Florence Harrison subsequently produced a variety of illustrative work published in further Blackie’s Children’s Annuals for the years 1907- 1922, with a final and fleeting inclusion in the 1940 edition.
1908: Includes a coloured frontispiece and several verses by Florence. Decoration and illustration to another story (“A little bunch of Primroses” by M. Batchelor). The front of this annual was adorned with a pictorial design by another of the distinguished illustrators of the day, whose name is more readily recognised: Charles Robinson.
1909: Includes Florence’s illustration to a story by Helen Broadbent, “Who are you Ganderfeather”, and her own illustrated verse. Again Charles Robinson contributed the front design, and H.M. Caldwell Company published the US edition.
1910: Florence contributed one of her own verses (“Sand and Sea”) to this, complete with full-page coloured illustration, as well as several depictions and a decoration for another Helen Broadbent story,The Princess seeks a Shadow. The pictorial design for the front was again by Charles Robinson, and there was an edition published by the H.M. Caldwell Company, New York, for the US market.
1911: With illustrations by Florence for various verses and a story by Helen Broadbent.
1912: Includes several verses by Florence, two of which with full-page coloured illustration.
1913: Includes two illustrated verses by Florence.
1914: With endpapers & various illustrative inclusions by Florence.
1915: Pictorial endpapers and various illustrative/decorative additions by Florence.
1916: Pictorial endpapers and various illustrations by Florence.
1917: With pictorial endpapers, title-page and illustrations to story and verse by Florence.
1918: With endpapers and a frontispiece relating to her own included verse “Tree in the Wood”, along with various illustrations, head & tailpieces to other pages and poems.
1919: Pictorial endpapers, varied verse and illustration, also additional art for other authors’ work.
1920: With various contributions by Florence.
1921: Including Florence’s work.
1922: Head & tailpieces to a verse by the eighteenth-century poet Annie Ingram.
1923: With frontispiece and an illustrated verse from Florence.
1940: Single tailpiece in line for another writer’s story.
1908
In the Fairy Ring by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1908).
“So excellent are the drawings that they earn Miss Harrison a very high place among the illustrators of children’s books.” The Pall Mall Magazine.
1910
Poems by Christina Rossetti.
Introduction by Alice Meynell. Blackie and Son Limited, London, Glasgow, Bombay. 1910.
When Christina Rossetti’s poems were originally published, Joseph Pennell, in “A Golden Decade in English Art”, pp 112-124, the Savoy Magazine Volume I, 1896, declared of the original edition: ‘But in 1862, Miss Rossetti’s “Poems”, illustrated by her brother with two drawings, came out; Rossetti also designed the cover. The illustrations can hardly be called satisfactory as illustrations, for the two Lizzies are quite different – the first a country girl; the second, a stately Rossetti woman. The second edition contains two more drawings, which were added in 1866. William Morris engraved the frontispiece to this book, signed “M MF & Co.” ‘
Perhaps he would have been more impressed by Florence’s exquisite portrayals of that same poetry. Originally commissioned to provide a cover, twenty-four full-colour plates, forty-eight black and white plates and one hundred and twenty vignettes, after two years of work, she delivered thirty-six colour plates and thirty-six in black and white.
The Bookman (American literary journal, 1895-1933) special Christmas number for 1910 included some of the illustrations. It was later re-issued by The Gresham Publishing Co. (an apparent subsidiary of Blackie’s) in 1916.
There was also a signed, limited edition of 350 copies bound in full vellum.
Florence Harrison brought to this volume some of her most recognisable and oft-reproduced illustrations, ethereal and evocative by turn, to enhance the soulful and melancholy verses of the sad-eyed sister of Dante Gabriel, to whose own paintings Florence apparently owed a debt. Nevertheless, her personal representations of feminine beauty far outshine the heavy-lidded portrayals of his own Muses. Although no particular model for Florence’s images of women has been noted, she seemed to show a particular predilection for frequently picturing red-haired females, who are certainly in evidence here. Laura & Lizzie in ‘Goblin Market’ spring to mind, as well as others. Of exceptional note is the exquisite rendering of the dreamlike figure for the line ‘She stood on inner ground that budded flowers’, from the poem ‘From House to Home.’
Blackie’s Sixpenny, Ninepenny and Shilling Series included covers by Florence for a variety of these titles.
Lesser works for that year include a frontispiece for “All Hallowe’en” in Little Folks magazine, 1910, Vol. 74.
1911
Catalogue of San-Kro-Mura easy-clean wallpaper.
This appears to be an odd addition to the bibliography, but the images it contained were apparently intended to be used in a frieze or as cut-out panels. Florence’s ‘contribution’ (the company, Schmitz-Horning Co. of Cleveland, owned the copyright by arrangement with H.M. Caldwell Company of New York) was a set of four coloured illustrated panels, and a further six panels, all of which were reproduced with some amendments from The Rhyme of a Run.
1912
Elfin Song, a Book of Verse and Pictures by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie & Son Limited, nd (1912).
A review of the book by critic Stephenson Browne appeared in the “Boston Literary News”, August 24th 1913.
~ The H. M. Caldwell Company is beginning to bring out its Autumn and holiday books, and among those in preparation one of the quaintest is Miss Florence Harrison’s “Elfin Song,” illustrated by the author’s own pictures of the elves, a naughty little company, as they are seen gathered about the black haired little hero, piping gayly to him and offering him mysterious enchanted fruits. The author’s first venture, “The Rhyme of a Run” is still selling well. ~
Guinevere and Other Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson. London: Blackie & Son Limited, 1912.
Issued in a publisher’s box, this was one of Blackie’s sumptuous gift books, destined, as was a good deal of Florence’s earlier work, as much for adults as for children.
Goblin Market edited by Edith Fry, MA. One of Blackie’s Smaller English Classics series. London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1912.
This contained limited illustration presumably from Florence’s previous work done for Poems by Christina Rossetti (see above, 1910).
1913
Blackie’s New Systematic English Readers, First Reader, by Eleanor I Chambers. Glasgow: Blackie and Son Limited., nd (1913).
Includes various verses illustrated by Florence, and one from her own pen.
Blackie’s New Systematic English Readers also included Florence Harrison’s work in the following years:
1914: Various verses illustrated by Florence.
1915: Various illustrations by Florence to assorted verses.
1916: Illustrations to the verses of various popular poets.
1914
The Early Poems of William Morris. London : Blackie & Son Limited, 1913.
An ornate collection of courtly tales, speaking of love, chivalry and downfall, decorated with black & white drawings and full-page colour plates featuring damsels of fragile beauty, bold knights of fierce demeanour, and handsome but doomed heroes.
1915
Under the Rainbow Arch by Margaret Cameron, in the ‘Rambler Nature Books’ series. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1915).
This has a full-colour frontispiece by Florence captioned “Cloud ships and the sunbeams bridge”, which is repeated in part as a pictorial inlay on the front cover.
1916
Tales in Rhyme and Colour by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1916)
With many and varied illustrations, together with verses, some of which reprinted from The Rhyme of a Run.
Tinkler Johnny by Agnes Grozier Herbertson. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1916).
Contains a full range of Florence’s illustrative work.
My Fairy Tale Book. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1916).
Florence’s illustrations here were reprinted from Blackie’s Children’s Annual, 1910.
1917
The House of Bricks by Agnes Grozier Herbertson. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1917).
Fully illustrated by Florence.
Blackie’s Book of New Fairy Tales, London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1917).
With illustrations by Florence reprinted from Blackie’s Children’s Annual 1910.
1918
The Pixy Book by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1918).
Fully illustrated by Florence. Contains work reprinted from In the Fairy Ring.
The Man in the Moon by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1918).
Fully illustrated with all verses reprinted from In the Fairy Ring.
Blackie’s Story Time Book. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1918).
Two coloured plates by Florence.
Note: Not to be confused with an undated volume published by Blackie and Son in 1916 with the same title and cover but no content by Florence.
My Short Story Book. Blackies. nd. One full-page coloured illustration by Florence captioned “A Moonlight Party”.
Godmother’s Garden by Netta Syrett. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1918).
With frontispiece and other coloured plates by Florence.
Poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson, Dublin: The Phoenix Publishing Company Limited, nd (1918).
Illustrations by Florence taken from the 1918 edition by the Talbot Press, Dublin (T. Unwin, London).
1919
Blackie’s Little Ones Book, Glasgow: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1919).
Frontispiece and other illustrations by Florence to assorted authors’ story and verse.
1920
Blackie’s Children’s Diary for 1921.
Verse and pictures by Florence Harrison. London: Blackie & Son Limited, nd (26 August 1920).
Blackie’s Little Ones’ Annual, Glasgow: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1920).
With textual illustration by Florence.
1922
A Child’s Posy: Verses from New Year Time till Christmas Comes. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1922)
This included various verses by Florence, and her illustrations, also added to other authors’ work. Four of the verses had been previously printed in Blackie’s Children’s Annuals.
Fairy Friends. London: Blackie & Son Limited, nd (1922)
With numerous illustrations from Florence.
Nature’s Year by Margaret Cameron, London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1922).
With one full-coloured illustration by Florence.
The Big Book for Girls, OUP, London: nd (1922).
Includes one verse by Florence.
Mrs Strang’s Annual for Children, London: OUP, nd (1922).
With numerous illustrations to story and verse by Florence.
This was the first of a number of future commissions for these particular annuals, in what appears to have been a very productive year in Florence Harrison’s professional life. Her work was also reproduced in the following annuals:
1923: With verse and line illustration.
1924: Verse & various illustrations by Florence, including a double-page captioned “The ship of dreams”.
1925: With a full-page coloured frontispiece, a headpiece & tailpiece, and a double-page coloured illustration captioned “The Winding Way”.
1926: With frontispiece and story as well as other coloured illustrations and a verse, all by Florence.
Sasha the Serf. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1922)
Florence executed the front cover illustration for these “stories of Russian life”.
Poems & Pictures for Little People. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1922).
Three verses by Florence, but only one with head & tailpiece included.
Winter Fun, Glasgow and London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1922).
Two full-page coloured illustrations by Florence.
Blackie’s Girls’ Annual, London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1922).
One verse by Florence with full-page colour illustration.
From 1922 she began contributing both illustrated story and verse to Blackie’s Girls’ Annual on a regular basis until 1931.
Her work was featured in the following annuals:
1924: With coloured frontispiece and corresponding verse by Florence.
1925: A full-page coloured frontispiece and corresponding decorated verse, entitled “Autumn”.
1926: Includes illustrated verse by Florence.
1927: With a story and full-page coloured illustration by Florence.
1928: With three verses and one full-page coloured illustration captioned “The Goose Girl” by Florence.
1930: With verse and story, the latter with text illustration in line, by Florence.
1931: With story and verses by Florence with head &/or tailpieces in line.
1923
The Daffodil Story Book. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1923).
With an illustrated story by Florence.
Goblin Market and other poems by Christina Rossetti, London: Blackie and Son Limited. One of the “Beautiful Poems” series, nd (1923).
Fully illustrated by Florence.
Shorter Poems by Christina Rossetti, London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1923).
One of the “Beautiful Poems” series.
Fully illustrated by Florence.
Taken from Poems by Christina Rossetti, 1910.
Tennyson’s Dream of Fair Women and other poems, London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1923). One of the “Beautiful Poems” series.
Fully illustrated by Florence.
Taken from Guinevere and Other Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1912.
Tennyson’s Guinevere and other poems. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1923).
One of the “Beautiful Poems” series.
Fully illustrated by Florence.
Taken from Guinevere and Other Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1912.
Fairy Tales for the Schoolroom. London: The Gresham Publishing Company Limited (a subsidiary company of Blackie & Son Limited), nd (1923).
Containing many illustrations by Florence for several authors’ stories and verse.
Mrs Strang’s Annual for Girls. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1923.
With illustrations for various authors’ work.
Florence Harrison’s work was also included in the following annuals:
1924: With one headpiece by Florence.
1925: With a full-page coloured frontispiece and various decorations by Florence.
1926: One illustration & headpiece by Florence.
The Summer Sunshine Book. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1923).
With two text illustrations by Florence.
Robin Redbreast Story Book. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1923).
This volume amalgamates the contents of The Sweetbriar Story Book and aforementioned The Daffodil Story Book.
1924
Pictured Rhymes for Little Readers by Grace M. Tuffley. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1924).
With a full-page colour illustration for “The Magic Road” from Elfin Song, and a further illustrated verse by Florence.
My Garden Book. London, Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1924).
Full-page coloured frontispiece by Florence.
The Hideaway Four, The Polly-Wolly Books. OUP, nd (1924).
With illustrated verse by Florence on inside front cover.
(This was reissued in 1942.)
1926
The Big Book of Pictures and Stories. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1926).
Several coloured illustrations and page-decorations by Florence.
My Great Big Picture Book, OUP, nd (1926).
With two double-page coloured illustrations by Florence.
My Very Own Book. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1926).
Includes one full-page coloured illustration by Florence.
The Tiny Folks’ Annual. OUP, nd (1926).
With verse, head & tailpieces and full-page coloured illustration by Florence, and further decoration and another double-page illustration elsewhere.
Cosy Corner Tales. nd OUP.
With story and line drawings plus coloured frontispiece captioned “The Brownie gets his cream” by Florence.
Children’s Verses of Town and Country by Hamish Hendry. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1926).
With one coloured plate by Florence. Reprinted from Elfin Song, 1912.
1927
The Fairy Kites by Ethel K Crawford. London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1927.
With coloured frontispiece and six full-page illustrations in line by Florence.
The Road to Somewhere by Enid Dinnis. London: Sands & Company, 1927.
Full-page frontispiece in line.
Work and Play Tales. OUP, nd (1927).
Full-page coloured frontispiece and related story by Florence.
Illustration reprinted from Mrs Strang’s Annual for Children, 1925.
1928
Merry Hours. OUP edited by Mrs Herbert Strang.
One double-page coloured illustration by Florence, captioned “A Rainy Day”.
The Oxford Annual for Children. OUP.
One story with headpiece in line, and full-page coloured frontispiece captioned “The Brownie gets his cream”, by Florence.
The Great Book for Children. OUP.
With full-page coloured frontispiece captioned “Jill and the Miller”, plus one story with head & tailpieces and text illustration, all by Florence.
1929
The Big Picture Book. Edited by Mrs Herbert Strang. London: Humphrey Milford, OUP, 1929.
With one double-page & one full-page coloured illustration by Florence.
The Great Book for Girls. OUP, nd (1929).
Full-page coloured frontispiece by Florence, with head and tailpieces and text illustration to a story by MIK Carruthers.
The picture and story reprinted from Mrs Strang’s Annual for Girls, 1925.
Tales for you and me. OUP, nd (1929).
Full-page coloured frontispiece by Florence, and a story with head and tailpieces.
Bed Time Stories. OUP, nd (1929).
With decorated verse by Florence.
Tuck-me up Tales. OUP, nd (1929).
Full-page coloured illustration and decorated verse by Florence.
1930
Our Darling’s Book to Paint. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, nd (1930).
Six full-page lithographed coloured illustrations with the same in uncoloured versions facing them.
The Oxford Annual for Children. London: Humphrey Milford, OUP, 1930.
With one double-page and one full-page coloured illustration by Florence.
The Great Book for Children. London: OUP, 1930.
Includes one story by Florence with head & tailpieces and one full page illustration in line.
Little Tales to Read and Tell. London: The Gresham Publishing Co. Ltd., nd (1930).
With a full-page coloured frontispiece by Florence, and a further half-page in line for a story by Beatrice R. Jackson.
Little Tales for Boys and Girls, London: The Gresham Publishing Co. Ltd., 1931.
With one full-page coloured illustration by Florence.
1931
The Girls’ Budget. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1931).
Includes a story with one text illustration in line, and a verse by Florence.
The Big Budget for Children. London: Blackie and Son Limited.
Several text illustrations in line for stories by other writers.
1932
By Fancy’s Footpath by EM Dinnis. London: Sands and Company. 1932.
Full illustration in various forms by Florence.
The Oxford Annual for Children. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1932.
With one story, two poems and a selection of illustrations all by Florence.
Mopsa the Fairy by Jean Ingelow, retold by Dorothy King. London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1932.
Florence contributed a full-page coloured frontispiece and three full-page coloured illustrations to the retelling of this children’s tale by the then well-known nineteenth-century English poet, who is another almost forgotten name today. (The original had also been republished by Harper & Brothers of New York, in 1927, with black & white illustrations by Dorothy Pulis Lathrop. Mopsa the Fairy is listed in some biographies as Florence Harrison’s last published work.)
For All of Us. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1932).
With an illustrated verse and a coloured frontispiece by Florence.
1933
My Lovely Pictures. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1933).
Florence’s full-page coloured illustration “Fairy Pedlars” was included with the work of several other artists of the period.
The Girls’ Budget. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1933).
With one verse and a story with headpiece and half-page illustration by Florence.
1935
The Great Book for Girls. Humphrey Milford. OUP, nd (1935).
Includes a story with headpiece, and a further vignette in line by Florence.
The Golden Story Book for Girls. London: Humphrey Milford, OUP, 1935.
With one verse and headpiece by Florence.
The Big Picture Book. Edited by Mrs Herbert Strang. London: Humphrey Milford, OUP, 1935.
With one double and one full-page coloured illustration, and one verse by Florence.
Two in a tub and other stories by Louie Jesse. One of Blackie’s Easy to Read Books.
This one stylistically circa 1935, with front cover by Gordon Robinson. Contains illustrations by Florence to stories Pixy Pix and Goblin Land.
1936
The Romance of Reading, first series, edited by RK and MIR Polkinghorn. Book 1: Merry Moments. London: OUP, 1936.
With a variety of illustrations by Florence.
The Romance of Reading, first series, edited by RK and MIR Polkinghorn. Book 2: Happy Hours. London: OUP, 1936.
With a full-page coloured frontispiece by Florence, and further line illustrations for two of the stories.
The Romance of Reading, first series, edited by RK and MIR Polkinghorn. Book 3: Pleasant Paths. London: OUP, 1936.
With several illustrations in line for one story, and a full-page colour plate by Florence for another.
The Romance of Reading, first series, edited by RK and MIR Polkinghorn. Book 4, Cosy Company. London: OUP, 1936.
With a full-page coloured frontispiece and further headpiece by Florence.
The Big Book for Children, Humphrey Milford. OUP, nd [1936].
With decorated verse by Florence, and one full-page coloured illustration.
The Streamline Readers, First Series, Book Three; edited by Larcombe and Freeman. London: OUP, nd [1936].
With illustrations by Florence to a story by Theodore Horton.
1937
The Curtain Rises and Other Stories by E. M. Dinnis. London: Burns, Oates & Company, 1937.
Florence Harrison had first illustrated work by Enid Dinnis in 1927. There now commenced a period of several years (1937-1943) where she provided a total of fifteen illustrations for a series of articles and stories written by Dinnis for The Sign magazine, the last two of which Florence completed for publication with Dinnis’ final texts, after the writer’s death.
A Stirring Book for Girls, London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1937), which included a full-page colour plate by Florence.
A Bunch of Girls’ Stories, London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1937), to which Florence contributed a story with one text illustration in line.
These were reprinted from Blackie’s Girls’ Annual, 1930.
(The back cover contained an illustration by one AE Bestall, who in 1935 had begun work on what would become his regular portrayal of the ageless Rupert Bear.)
1942
The Three Silver Pennies by Dorothy King. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1942). One of Blackie’s Large-Type Supplementary Infant Readers.
With a frontispiece, thirteen text illustrations and a tailpiece in line by Florence.
Reprinted with additions 1952.
1945
Four Little Farmers. Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, nd (1945). A “Polly-Wolly Book”.
With one full-page illustration, title-piece and tailpiece by Florence.
1951
The Bumper Book for Girls. London: The Children’s Press, nd (1951).
Includes a decorated verse by Florence.
Just what I like. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1951).
Two text illustrations in line by Florence.
(Possibly a re-issue in part of a 1932 edition.)
1955
The Magic Duck and other stories by Dorothy King. London: Blackie and Son Limited, nd (1955).
With a pictorial inlay on the cover, a frontispiece and various text illustrations in line, this was the last known publication to include work by Florence, fittingly produced by Blackie & Son in the year of her death.
* The list is based on and corresponds with the details provided by Mary Jacobs in the IBIS magazine/newsletter article from ‘Studies in Illustration’, number 46, Winter 2010.
~~~~~~~~~
Footnotes:
1. Anna Massey Lea Merritt, “A Letter to Artists; Especially Women Artists.”
2. Excerpt from William Morris’s (1834-1896) Frank’s Sealed Letter, which appeared in the April 1856 edition of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, a publication running from January to December 1856. The magazine was produced by a group of undergraduates calling themselves ‘The Brotherhood’, and led by Morris himself, Edward Burne-Jones and William Fulford.
3. Joseph Pennell ((1857-1926). MODERN ILLUSTRATION. (1895).
George Bell & Sons Ltd., London & New York.
Chapter VI. American Illustration. page 127.
4. Excerpt from short biographical note in “The Last Romantics, The Romantic Tradition in British Art: Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer”. Edited by John Christian & published by Lund Humphries, London, in association with Barbican Art Gallery. (1989). Works in the exhibition appear to have included several illustrations by Florence Harrison for Christina Rossetti’s Poems, (1910), William Morris’ Early Poems (1914), and also Tennyson’s Guinevere and other Poems (1912), all published by Blackie & Son Ltd (London & Glasgow) from the nineteenth-century original editions.
5. Fuller detail of Mary Jacob’s most interesting research is available at the web site she has dedicated to Florence Susan Harrison’s life and work. Florence Harrison
~~~~~~~~~
This newsletter could not have been written without the help of many people.
Indeed, little or nothing at all would have been written without the incredible dedication and tenacity of Mary Rosalind Jacobs, to whom we owe all of the facts about Florence’s life, who has patiently sifted certainty from error, and generously allowed me to make use of her hard work. Thanks as well to her husband Alan for his help supplying images.
Special thanks to Ann Carling, for her determination in discovering illustrations and clues to Florence Harrison’s life, and for her inspired thoughts about the rest.
Thanks to the Geoffrey Beare, at The Imaginative Book Illustration Society, for permission to use information from Mary Jacobs’ article on Florence Harrison (Studies in Illustration, No 46, Winter 2010).
Thanks to Ruth Prickett, editor of Illustration Magazine, for permission to use information from Mary Jacob’s article on Florence Harrison (Issue 28, Summer 2011)
Thanks to Catherine Andrews, at Chris Beetles Art Gallery, for allowing us to show originals of Florence Harrison’s line work.
Thanks to Alan Lupack at The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester for providing assorted images from Guinevere and Other Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Thanks to Sue Walker at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, for permission to use the illustrations from The Three Silver Pennies.
Thanks to Pat Garrett, at the Children’s Books History Society for the kind help and advice.
Posted by John on 15/09/11 | 03:59 AM | Chronicles
Come Unto These Yellow Sands – but mind the naked fairies…
A Few Words First
Most of my favourite newsletters are the ones I’ve not written. Not principally because some generous soul has spared me racing against looming deadlines, but because the texts written by talented authors who generously allow me to reproduce them here are always a delight to discover.
Charlotte Zeepvat is, in her own words, a “compulsive researcher, endlessly fascinated by finding things out, model maker, painter (never quite finding the skill to match the pictures in my head but still game to try) and would-be but probably-never-will-be illustrator, historian by training, writer, and collector of old photographs.” She writes books, occasionally illustrates them, and knows astonishing things about subjects few have heard of or even considered.
Charlotte has a web site, currently with hoarding all about and “Under Construction” signs up all around, and very politely declined my offer to list her books because they “probably won’t be of much interest to anyone who wants fantasy and fairies.” So, you’ll have to look up her work on your own. You can also take her qualification of “would-be but probably-never-will-be illustrator” with a grain of salt. Her artwork is detailed and exquisite.
But, in the meantime, read on, and do mind the fairies.
Come Unto These Yellow Sands – but mind the naked fairies
…a few thoughts on Victorian fairy painting
If I mentioned flower fairies would you run for cover? It sounds a world away from the darker, edgier ‘faeries’ of modern fantasy art but I used to love Cicely Mary Barker’s little Flower Fairy books, with their delicate watercolour illustrations of wild or garden plants. She painted her flowers from life, each one botanically accurate and accompanied by an attendant fairy (also painted from life), a pretty child with butterfly wings, dressed in a costume that echoes the form and colour of the petals and leaves and, in intention at least, posed to capture something of the plant’s character. It’s all very innocent, very sweet, suggesting no hint of the danger that has always been the shadow side of dealings with fairies. Tolkien’s Faerie held ‘beauty that is an enchantment and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords.’ CMB showed Faerie on its best behaviour, hair brushed and party dress on, ready to play in the nursery.
She was born in the closing years of Victoria’s reign, when fairies had dwindled to an entertainment for children. But earlier, for at least three, maybe four decades of the mid-19th century, fairy painting was a fashionable theme in mainstream British art, taken seriously even by such august bodies as the Royal Academy and very definitely for the grown-ups. It was an extremely British fantasy, offering escape from a world that was becoming increasingly mechanised and industrialized. It celebrated new developments in the theatre. Most important, it gave artists a context in which to explore things that were otherwise unacceptable in respectable circles: nudity and sex, the use of opiates, dreams, nightmares and the stranger reaches of the human mind.
Several things combined to bring this about. The first was the Romantic movement of the mid-18th century, which affected the whole spectrum of art, literature, music, and thought. Romanticism stressed the importance of emotion, intuition and imagination. It argued for a new appreciation of untamed nature; nature was powerful and in time it would overwhelm the work of man. Romanticism valued the past too, reviving interest in the medieval world and in oral traditions, folklore, folk art and customs; new collections of this material led in turn to a rise in national awareness (and opened several doors through which Faerie could easily slip).
In Britain the art world had been dominated for centuries by Classical subjects and the best commissions went to foreign artists. Now there were calls for a national school of art. In 1746 William Hogarth set up a venue at the Foundling Hospital in London where artists could show their work and 1768 saw the foundation of the Royal Academy, to raise the professional status of British artists through education and to showcase their work.
Enter the unlikely figure of a London Alderman. John Boydell was an engraver who built a substantial fortune publishing and selling prints and he had every sympathy with the artists; his own pet grievance was French domination of the continental print trade. At a dinner party in 1786 someone suggested a new edition of Shakespeare, illustrated by the best artists of the day, and Boydell seized the idea and ran with it. He planned not only the edition but also a folio of different Shakespeare engravings (to maximize sales) and a purpose-built gallery for the original paintings. The gallery opened in Pall Mall in 1789, with new pictures being added as the work progressed, and publication, by public suscription, began in 1791. The whole venture was a resounding success, particularly the gallery, which became a fashionable attraction. And there were fairy paintings among its treasures, illustrating a Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and Macbeth. The Swiss artist John Henry Fuseli had a flair for supernatural subjects and he painted Puck, Oberon and Titania, and Macbeth’s witches: Fuseli would have considerable influence over later fairy painters. But at the time Boydell’s biggest coup lay in persuading Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, to contibute. He was paid £1500 – at least six times the salary of the other artists – and given a free choice of subject.
Reynolds painted Puck, as a chubby baby, naked save for a strategic cloth, against a generic landscape background. It looks like any other Reynolds child portrait, save for the fact that Puck has the pointy ears and upswept eyebrows we associate now with fairies, elves and their kin. It’s a curious detail which begs the question, if this was one of the first fairy paintings, where did the iconography come from?
The success of Boydell’s Gallery established the plays, and with them the fairies, as acceptable subjects for serious painting. In 1832 the landscape painter Francis Danby produced ‘Oberon and Titania, Scene from a Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in which the tiny winged figures are lit by a haunting blend of moon and glow worm light. The Dream was by far the most popular subject for fairy painters but Danby’s ‘Fairies by a Rocky Stream’ is an early example of a fairy subject not from Shakespeare, as is ‘Pan and the Fairies’, painted in 1834 by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise, who moved to London in the 1820s to study at the Academy.
Left: Two of Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies (From Flower Fairies of the Wayside, 1940s)
Centre: From Boydell’s Gallery:
1. Puck, by Sir Joshua Reynolds
2. Engraving of John Henry Fuseli’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’
Right: Early fairy paintings:
1. Francis Danby, ‘Oberon and Titania, Scene from a Midsummer Night’s Dream’
2. Daniel Maclise, ‘Pan and the Fairies’ (the title was changed to ‘Faun and the Fairies’ some time later when the painting was used as an illustration
3. Maclise, ‘Priscilla Horton as Ariel’
Maclise made his name with large-scale history paintings but he was also a portrait painter and it’s one of his portraits from the 1830s, ‘Priscilla Horton as Ariel’ which introduces the third theme in fairy painting’s rise. First Romanticism, then Shakespeare, now the theatre. Horton played Ariel in William Macready’s 1838 production of The Tempest, a wildly extravagant and very popular production in which she delivered her lines as she flew over the stage on wires. That same year Macready put on an equally lavish, equally lucrative version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which offered the first complete performance of the text since Shakespeare’s day, a fairy ballet and all manner of spectacular effects. Both Oberon and Puck were played by women. In 1840 the role of Oberon was taken by Elizabeth Vestris, who was famous for her legs. Popular engravings often showed her in knee-length costumes, raising her skirt a coy few inches; no wonder the association grew between fairies and sex.
The success of these productions and others like them fuelled the demand for paintings of fairies and they also affected the way both artists and public viewed them, not only in terms of the actors but also the stage itself. Gaslight had been introduced to the theatre in 1817 and the 1820s saw the invention of ‘limelight’ – calcium light – with its brilliant contrasts. Most fairy paintings of the mid-century were strongly influenced by stage lighting.
By the 1840s fairies were everywhere – in the theatre, the ballet, the opera, and books, and fairy painting was attracting both older, established artists and newcomers, keen to make their name. In 1841 fairy paintings by a 22-year-old former student of the Academy, Richard Dadd, received an enthusiastic reception from the critics. ‘Puck’, which combined elements of Maclise’s ‘Pan and the Fairies’ and Reynolds’ ‘Puck’ with a strangeness unique to Dadd, was praised for its mysterious, dramatic lighting when it was shown at the Society of British Artists. ‘Titania Sleeping’, exhibited at the Academy that summer, led to predictions of a bright future for Dadd and in 1842 he scored another critical triumph with ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’, a vision of semi-naked dancing fairies illustrating Ariel’s song from The Tempest. There was only one critical comment, that the sand wasn’t yellow; this came from John Eagles of Blackwood’s Magazine, who would later attack Ruskin for his defence of the Pre-Raphaelites. But Dadd’s career was tragically short. He suffered a form of mental breakdown, killed his father in 1843 and fled to France, where he stabbed a tourist, was captured, and came home to spend the rest of his life in mental institutions. But he was still encouraged to work and in the 1850 and 60s produced two of the most important Victorian fairy paintings, ‘Contradiction: Oberon and Titania’ and ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’; these were not seen in public until the 1930s.
In 1845 a young Richard Doyle, later to become one of the best-loved fairy illustrators, exhibited ‘The Enchanted Fairy Tree’ at the Academy. Turner was approaching the end of his career in 1846 when he tried his hand with ‘Queen Mab’s Dream’, and 1847 saw a clutch of significant fairy paintings, including Robert Huskisson’s ‘There Sleeps Titania’ and ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’. These were a critical success at the Academy, where it was predicted that Huskisson would play a leading role in British art. He was one of the first to make fairy painting his speciality but people mocked his thick Nottinghamshire accent and lack of education and after 1854 he ceased to exhibit.
Joseph Noel Paton was more successful. A friend of Millais at the Academy Schools, Paton’s first fairy painting , ‘The Reconciliation of Oberon and Titania’ won a £300 prize in the 1847 Westminster Hall Competition. Paton shared many of Millais’ ideas and would probably have joined the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood if he had stayed in England. But he preferred his native Scotland, securing admission to the Royal Scottish Academy with another fairy picture. In 1849, the year after the formation of the PRB, Paton produced the companion picture to his ‘Reconciliation’, ‘The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania’. This caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Scottish Academy in 1850 and it remained a very fashionable painting: no one seemed to notice, or mind, the amount of erotic imagery in the densely packed swirl of naked fairies round the king and queen. In 1857 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), said he had counted 165 fairies in the painting but he seemed oblivious to what they were doing.
Left: Richard Dadd:
1. Engraving of ‘Puck’, 1841
2. ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’, 1842
3. ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’
Centre:
1. Richard Doyle, ‘The Enchanted Fairy Tree’
2. Joseph Noel Paton, ‘The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania’
Right: The Pre-Raphaelites:
1. John Everett Millais, ‘Ferdinand Lured by Ariel’
2. William Bell Scott, ‘Cockcrow’
3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Maids of Elfin Mere’
The bright colours and closely observed details in ‘The Quarrel’ echoed the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites and in the same year that Paton was working on the picture his friend Millais was painting one of his first major pieces in the Pre-Raphaelite style. ‘Ferdinand Lured by Ariel’ illustrates the same scene as ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’, but where Dadd and Huskisson took the words of Ariel’s song, Millais showed its effect on the listening Ferdinand. He rejected the theatrical approach altogether and set his scene in a natural landscape. A dealer reserved the painting in advance and Millais spent weeks in an Oxfordshire garden painstakingly recreating what he saw. But the dealer rejected the painting because of the fairies; if he’d been expecting a glamorous actress, Millais’ bright green Ariel, ringed by a circle of equally green bat-like goblins, was probably something of a shock.
William Bell Scott, a friend of Rossetti, painted fairies in ‘Cockcrow’ in 1856, also some scenes from The Tempest’, but the PRB themselves did not tackle any further fairy paintings. Their influence is obvious in the bright colours and attention to detail in the work of other fairy painters but their own contribution was mainly in illustration. In 1855 Rossetti, Millais and Arthur Hughes were commissioned to illustrate a collection of fairy poems by William Allingham; Rossetti’s ‘The Maids of Elfin Mere’, depicting a very different, dream-like form of human enchantress, drew both Burne-Jones and William Morris to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In 1862 Rossetti illustrated his sister Christina’s poem Goblin Market.
Dreams played an important part in the work of the most original, and after Dadd, probably the most important of all the fairy painters. John Anster Fitzgerald made his living with portraits and drawings for the Illustrated London News but his real subject was fairies. He painted a series of dream images, where a sleeping figure – in one case himself, in others a young woman – is surrounded by a series of weird goblins reminiscent of Bosch or Brueghel, humorous or menacing by turns. Often he hints at the use of opiates. Fitzgerald’s fairies are plucked straight from his imagination: tiny or human-sized, pretty or grotesque, dressed in historical costumes, flowers, or a mixture of both, they inhabit brightly coloured landscapes, sometimes in harmony and sometimes at odds with his meticulously painted birds and animals. In watercolour Fitzgerald’s fairies are more impressionistic and ethereal but all his paintings have a hallucinatory quality with a faintly disturbing edge. All the known examples date from the 1850s and 60s and his later career is a mystery but he lived until 1906 and some years afterwards a friend recalled, ‘He was known as ‘Fairy Fitzgerald’ from the fact that his work, both colour and black-and-white, was devoted to fairy scenes, in fact his life was one long Midsummer Night’s Dream.’
By the 1860s much fairy painting focussed on the female nude, with a declining interest in narrative. Thomas Heatherley, who taught Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Millais, tried his hand at fairy painting; his ‘Fairy Seated on a Mushroom’ of 1860 shows the back view of a naked woman, not very well covered by her extremely long hair, a troop of flying fairies and, around her feet, some colourful and surreal little figures. The painter John Simmons attempted some scenes from Shakespeare but most of his fairy pictures are unashamedly erotic; idealised nudes, elegantly posed and beautifully painted, acceptable to Victorian taste only because they have wings and are therefore not human.
Left: John Anster Fitzgerald:
1. ‘The Stuff Dreams are Made Of’
2. ‘Who Killed Cock Robin’
Centre: The fairy as pin-up
1. Thomas Heatherley, ‘Fairy Seated on a Mushroom’
2. John Simmons, ‘Titania’
Right: The mood changes:
1. Joseph Noel Paton, ‘The Fairy Rade’
2. Thomas Maybank, ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’
But the mood was changing. In 1855 Joseph Noel Paton, who had built his reputation on the Oberon and Titania paintings and other fairy pictures in the same vein, painted ‘The Pursuit of Pleasure’, in which a very attractive naked fairy is followed by a crowd of revellers. Unseen above their heads is the painter’s comment: the shadowy figure of an angel with a drawn sword. Paton painted his last fairy picture in 1867, taking his theme from Scottish folklore. ‘The Fairy Rade’ shows a troop of fairies carrying a changeling child. On one side is the dark forest through which they have come, on the other a twilit hillside with three standing stones. The painting is as crowded and meticulous as Paton’s earlier work, the detail as fine, but these fairies are fully dressed in medieval costume. In keeping with a general tightening in public morality, fairyland was being reinvented as a subject for all the family and the step from there to the nursery was a short one. The art establishment was also turning its back. The reviewer of Blackwood’s Magazine loved ‘The Fairy Rade’ but the Athenaeum dismissed it as ‘a work of the ‘illustrated book’ class,’ (there’s an insult), insinuating that the subject itself was not worthy of such a large-scale treatment.
And increasingly from the 1870s onwards, the task of bringing Faerie to life was left to the illustrators – Richard Doyle, Gustav Doré, Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham and others, including CMB, many of them as brilliant and original in their work, ‘illustrated book class’ or not. But the art world had moved on and fairies were just for the children. One painting says it all. Thomas Maybank’s ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’ of 1906 takes the same scene that Dadd and Huskisson painted but in the place of their scantily clad, otherworldly fairies a troop of cute cherubs play in the surf. Instead of their moody darkness, lit by brilliant flares of light, Maybank paints a sunny day – and his sand is definitely yellow.
Charlotte Zeepvat, August 2011
Posted by John on 16/08/11 | 11:41 PM | Chronicles
SHIPS IN THE AIR
Or a Short History of Flights of Fantasy
“…Give me the ships, with sails adapted to the heavenly wind; there will be fearless people, even if they face the immensity. And for those descendants who in short time will venture themselves by these ways we will prepare…” The words are from Johannes Kepler, written to Galileo Galilei in his “Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo” published in 1610. Four centuries ago.
A few days ago, I was exchanging e-mails with a good friend who works in publishing, and somehow we got to wondering about the imagery of ships in the sky. I hardly require a better excuse than that to embark on a frivolous image quest.
I’m sure most of us have, somewhere tucked away in our memories, faded or vivid, the image of a galleon tacking across a cloudscape or a sea of stars. They are, along with many other modern archetypes, part of our collective culture, evoking a sense of wonderment, a Peter Pan image that never grows stale, that never grows up.
But who first put ships in the air?
When the Tuatha Dé Danaan invaded Ireland, they arrived in flying ships. This may be a juxtaposition of two accounts – the earlier, the Lebor Gabála Érenn, or Book of Invasions, speaking of their arrival in “dark clouds” that obscured the sun for three days. A later account speaks of ships, which they burnt, so that regret might not drive them to flee.
The 9th-century Carolingian bishop Agobard of Lyon also speaks of cloud ships sailing from the realm of Magonia, allied with Frankish tempestarii, and wreaking havoc on crops. In his words: “But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. But when truth had prevailed, however, after much argument, the people who had exhibited the captives, in accordance with the prophecy (Jeremiah 2:26) ‘were confounded … as the thief is confounded when he is taken.’ ” (Agobard’s treatise on weather magic admittedly is far more exciting than your average evening news forecast, though he was more concerned about witch-hunts instigated to prosecute those suspected of causing foul weather.)
Hindu mythology speaks of flying vessels. In the Ramayana (Rajya-Abhisheka, Book XI, Chapter III), the pushpaka (flowery) vimana of Ravana, the first flying vimana mentioned in Hindu mythology is described as follows: “The Pushpaka chariot that resembles the Sun and belongs to my brother was brought by the powerful Ravana; that aerial and excellent chariot going everywhere at will …that chariot resembling a bright cloud in the sky…and the king [Rama] got in, and the excellent chariot at the command of the Raghira, rose up into the higher atmosphere.”
The Egyptian sun god Ra possessed a solar barge, sailing across the sky from east to west, and then back through the Underworld each night, where he and his crew-members fought off repeated attacks from the foul and viscous Apophis, who would throw his bulk at them from the darkness of Duat’s stygian regions.
An aside; other means of heavenly transport were popular, chariots being the favourite means of locomotion. Apollo or Helios, or Phaëton, Thor, Indra, Pūsan, Mog Ruith all had chariots that flew. (Another aside, but only for the beautifully wild imagery: Irish demi-god Manannan mac Lir possessed a chariot which he could drive on the waves as surely as the land.)
Nor is the Bible devoid of solar chariots – in Kings 2, God sends a fiery conveyance drawn by flaming horses to convey Elijah to Heaven (He had originally opted for a whirlwind).
Left: Astronomer Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) Copy of a portrait dated 1610, from the Benediktinerkloster in Krems, unknown artist.
Centre: Legendary Flying ships
A. Page from the Book of Leinster containing a compilation of medieval Irish literature, genealogy and myth. It includes amongst other elements the Lebor Gabála Érenn (Book of Invasions);
B. Bishop Agobard
C. Tempestarii
D. Rama welcomed home, 17th century manuscript of the Ramayana.
E. Rama returns homeward in a red flying vessel, from a 17th century manuscript of the Ramayana
F. Amon-Ra and his solar barge.
Right: Mythical flying chariots
A. Trundholm sun chariot
B. Helios, from a cycle of planetary themes, Schloss Eggenberg
C. Phaéton on the Chariot of Apollo by Nicolas Bertin, circa 1720
D. The Fall of Phaeton by Peter Paul Rubens
E. Thor’s Battle Against the Ettins by Mårten Eskil Winge, 1872
F. Giuseppe Angeli, Elijah Taken Up in a Chariot of Fire by Guiseppe Angeli, 1740-45, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
G. Konark Sun Temple Chariot Wheel
All in all, though, early tales of flying ships and chariots find their most fervent advocates amongst Theosophists and UFO enthusiasts; proof, if you will, of ancient alien tourism. A fine example comes from the Rig Veda, verses RV 1.164.47-48, where the one translation of the text reads: “Dark the descent: the birds are golden-coloured; up to the heaven they fly robed in the waters.
Again descend they from the seat of Order, and all the earth is moistened with their fatness.”
“Twelve are the fellies, and the wheel is single; three are the naves. What man hath understood it?
Therein are set together spokes three hundred and sixty, which in nowise can be loosened.” (translation: Griffith)
In Swami Dayananda Saraswati’s translation, these verses become:
“jumping into space speedily with a craft using fire and water ... containing twelve stamghas (pillars), one wheel, three machines, 300 pivots, and 60 instruments.”
Flying saucers, anyone? We moderns are ever at the mercy of our translators.
Will you pardon another aside? (This newsletter is becoming as unpredictable as Kai Kavoos’ flight, about which I haven’t even spoken yet.) Following is an extensive and delicious quote from The Story of Atlantis: A Geographical, Historical and Ethnological Sketch by W. Scott-Elliot, published in 1896, which achieves a delightfully deft blend of cusp-of-the-century science, romanticism, proto-steampunk and just plain daydreaming, likely induced by the fumes of too much midnight oil consumed in the study of ancient Hindu texts:
“If the system of water supply in the “City of the Golden Gates” was wonderful, the Atlantean methods of locomotion must be recognised as still more marvellous, for the air-ship or flying-machine which Keely in America, and Maxim in this country are now attempting to produce, was then a realised fact. It was not at any time a common means of transport. The slaves, the servants, and the masses who laboured with their hands, had to trudge along the country tracks, or travel in rude carts with solid wheels drawn by uncouth animals. The air-boats may be considered as the private carriages of those days, or rather the private yachts, if we regard the relative number of those who possessed them, for they must have been at all times difficult and costly to produce. They were not as a rule built to accommodate many persons. Numbers were constructed for only two, some allowed for six or eight passengers. In the later days when war and strife had brought the Golden Age to an end, battle ships that could navigate the air had to a great extent replaced the battle ships at sea—having naturally proved far more powerful engines of destruction. These were constructed to carry as many as fifty, and in some cases even up to a hundred fighting men.
The material of which the air-boats were constructed was either wood or metal. The earlier ones were built of wood-the boards used being exceedingly thin, but the injection of some substance which did not add materially to the weight, while it gave leather-like toughness, provided the necessary combination of lightness and strength. When metal was used it was generally an alloy—two white-coloured metals and one red one entering into its composition. The resultant was white-coloured, like aluminium, and even lighter in weight. Over the rough framework of the air-boat was extended a large sheet of this metal, which was then beaten into shape, and electrically welded where necessary. But whether built of metal or wood their outside surface was apparently seamless and perfectly smooth, and they shone in the dark as if coated with luminous paint.
In shape they were boat-like, but they were invariably decked over, for when at full speed it could not have been convenient, even if safe, for any on board to remain on the upper deck. Their propelling and steering gear could be brought into use at either end.
But the all-interesting question is that relating to the power by which they were propelled. In the earlier times it seems to have been personal vril that supplied the motive power—whether used in conjunction with any mechanical contrivance matters not much—but in the later days this was replaced by a force which, though generated in what is to us an unknown manner, operated nevertheless through definite mechanical arrangements. This force, though not yet discovered by science, more nearly approached that which Keely in America used to handle than the electric power used by Maxim. It was in fact of an etheric nature, but though we are no nearer to the solution of this problem, its method of operation can be described. The mechanical arrangements no doubt differed somewhat in different vessels. The following description is taken from an air-boat in which on one occasion three ambassadors from the king who ruled over the northern part of Poseidonis made the journey to the court of the southern kingdom. A strong heavy metal chest which lay in the centre of the boat was the generator. Thence the force flowed through two large flexible tubes to either end of the vessel, as well as through eight subsidiary tubes fixed fore and aft to the bulwarks. These had double openings pointing vertically both up and down. When the journey was about to begin the valves of the eight bulwark tubes which pointed downwards were opened—all the other valves being closed. The current rushing through these impinged on the earth with such force as to drive the boat upwards, while the air itself continued to supply the necessary fulcrum. When a sufficient elevation was reached the flexible tube at that end of the vessel which pointed away from the desired destination, was brought into action, while by the partial closing of the valves the current rushing through the eight vertical tubes was reduced to the small amount required to maintain the elevation reached. The great volume of current, being now directed through the large tube pointing downwards from the stern at an angle of about forty-five degrees, while helping to maintain the elevation, provided also the great motive power to propel the vessel through the air. The steering was accomplished by the discharge of the current through this tube, for the slightest change in its direction at once caused an alteration in the vessel’s course. But constant supervision was not required. When a long journey had to be taken the tube could be fixed so as to need no handling till the destination was almost reached. The maximum speed attained was about one hundred miles an hour, the course of flight never being a straight line, but always in the form of long waves, now approaching and now receding from the earth. The elevation at which the vessels travelled was only a few hundred feet—indeed, when high mountains lay in the line of their track it was necessary to change their course and go round them—the more rarefied air no longer supplying the necessary fulcrum. Hills of about one thousand feet were the highest they could cross. The means by which the vessel was brought to a stop on reaching its destination—and this could be done equally well in mid-air—was to give escape to some of the current force through the tube at that end of the boat which pointed towards its destination, and the current impinging on the land or air in front, acted as a drag, while the propelling force behind was gradually reduced by the closing of the valve. The reason has still to be given for the existence of the eight tubes pointing upwards from the bulwarks. This had more especially to do with the aerial warfare. Having so powerful a force at their disposal, the warships naturally directed the current against each other. Now this was apt to destroy the equilibrium of the ship so struck and to turn it upside down—a situation sure to be taken advantage of by the enemy’s vessel to make an attack with her ram. There was also the further danger of being precipitated to the ground, unless the shutting and opening of the necessary valves were quickly attended to. In whatever position the vessel might be, the tubes pointing towards the earth were naturally those through which the current should be rushing, while the tubes pointing upwards should be closed. The means by which a vessel turned upside down, might be righted and placed again on a level keel, was accomplished by using the four tubes pointing downwards at one side of the vessel only, while the four at the other side were kept closed.
The Atlanteans had also sea-going vessels which were propelled by some power analogous to that above mentioned, but the current force which was eventually found to be most effective in this case was denser than that used in the air-boats.”
Likely enough, it’s vril power that makes Plato turn over in his grave.
Alexander the Great famously took to the sky in a comfortable seat borne aloft by a quarto of griffins (in passing, he also invented the diving bell), but he was copying an exploit already realized twelve centuries before by Kai Kavoos, as the Persian poet Ferdowsi recorded in the Shahnameh, or Book of Kings. Kai Kavoos was a powerful ruler, and like all powerful rulers, sensitive to criticism. A div, or evil spirit, in the guise of a handsome youth taunted him by pretending that his earthly spendour was but that – earthly, and the skies escaped his rule. A true king should rule the heavens also, and Kai Kavoos resolved to take possession of the heavens. He commanded a wood and gold throne to be constructed, with an eagle attached to each corner, a leg of mutton suspended above each. The eagles strained upwards to attain their meal, raising him into the clouds. He eventually crash-landed in China, but was rescued by his compatriot, the hero Rostam. The tale was popular in Persia from the 3rd century onwards. Alexander held kebabs aloft scepter-like to entice his griffins to fly, apparently did a quick tour in the airs above Nineveh and landed safely. Due to his greater notoriety, he stole the show from his Persian precursor. The myth was hugely popular from the 9th century until well into the Renaissance, when it faded from fashionable iconography. Alexander did manage to have the airport in Skopje named after him, although whether or not in-flight meals can also be attributed to him is another matter.
Left: Alexander’s heavenly flight
A. Byzantine relief of Alexander the Great with a chariot with Griffins. Peribleptos Mistra bas-relief, 10th century
B. Alexander the Great in a chariot drawn by griffins, enamel, circa 1160, Victoria & Albert Museum
C. Mosaic from Otranto, 1166
D. Alexander with eagles in lieu of griffins. Banner, dated 1266, from the Mainfränkisches Museum, Würzburg.
E. Manuscript illustration of Alexander’s heavenly flight, 14th century(?)
F. Capital, late twelfth - early thirteenth century, Freiburg im Breisgau
G. Plate with depiction of Alexander the Great’s heavenly flight, Byzantium, late 12th - early 13th century.
H. The Romance of Alexander, illustration by Flemish illuminator Jehan de Grise and his workshop, 1338-44
I. Miniature from the Romance of Alexander, 15th century (?)
J. Jans Jansen Enikel, Weltchronik Heidelberg, about 1420
K. 15th century misericord from St Mary’s Church, Beverley, Yorkshire.
L. Detail from a 15th century Flemish tapestry
M. Woodcut, dated ca. 1516, attributed to Hans Schäufelein
Centre: The Flight of Kai Kavoos
Left: miniature from the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, circa.1525-30
Center: Miniature from the Shahnameh
Right: Kai Kavoos, or “An Early Idea of Aviation”, courtesy of Wills’s Cigarettes, back when smoking was not only good for you, but educational as well.
Right: The Departure of Vainamoinen, by Askeli Gallen-Kalella
Other legendary heroes attempted similar maiden flights: Nimrod, after his unsuccessful attempt to reach Heaven by the laborious expedient of building the Tower of Babel, elected to try in a chest to which he attached four eagles. He was no luckier, and crashed into a mountain which shook with the impact.
In the fiftieth and last song of the Finnish Kalevala, the hero Väinämöinen sets sail from earth and earthly travails, leaving his songs and his harp as legacy.
So old Väinämöinen sailed,
Sailed out in his copper vessel,
In his winged copper boat,
To the upper worldly regions,
To the lowest levels of the heavens.
Wingèd celestial steeds were also much sought after, but that is well beyond even my admittedly haphazard flight plan.
Flying ships reappear in the Middle Ages. According to Irish chronicles, ships appeared in the sky over Clonmacnoise in 721 AD. Ships complete with their crews were observed again in the same region in 746. Much later, Hieronymus Bosch unobtrusively paints a few in the sky on the left-hand and central panels of his triptych of Temptation of Saint Anthony. Miniaturist Guillaume Leroy depicts an early 16th-century allegorical Ship of Fortune with a wing in the place of sails, though he has seen fit to set it afloat on water and not in the sky.
Wings of course, from Icarus onwards, were well-known in myth, though perilous and often disastrous. Which didn’t stop the enterprising and foolhardy from trying for real.
According to one account, in 852 AD a Moor named Armen Firman constructed a voluminous cloak stiffened with wooden struts and leaped from a tower in Cordoba. Firman was successful – his injuries were minor.
In 875 AD an Andalusian polymath Abbas ibn-Firnas “covered himself with feathers for the purpose, …attached a couple of wings to his body, and getting on an eminence, flung himself into the air.” Like most would-be Icari, his landing was a hard one. “...not knowing that birds when they alight come down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one.” Ibn-Firnas severely injured his back (he was, after all, a respectable if temerarious 65 years of age at the time). He also invented a water clock and corrective lenses, and remained firmly earthbound thereafter. There is a statue of him at the entry to Baghdad International Airport.
Daedalus even inspired the Vikings; a story dating from around 885 ascribes a winged escape from an island prison to the Norse hero Wayland the Smith. His brother Egil was less successful, and crashed when he inaccurately judged the wind.
Medieval historian William of Malmsbury recounts the exploits of the Benedictine monk Eilmer (also of Malmesbury), who leaped from a tower and managed a furlong with wings affixed to his hands and feet around the year 1010 AD, but broke his legs upon landing and was lame thereafter.
Leonardo’s da Vinci energetically designed flying machines centuries ahead of his time, though they were of course impractical with the materials at hand. The great Leonardo scribbled over 500 sketches of aerial contraptions, including plans for a primitive helicopter, or “airscrew”. He did, however refrain from throwing himself off high places with anything fanciful attached.
According to a local tale, a blacksmith named Johanson constructed wings and launched himself successfully off the church steeple of the little Latvian town of Priekule Zvierdis in the late 1600’s. His exploit was rather less well received by the local Lutheran authorities; he was denounced as an acolyte of Satan and burned at the stake.
In 1638, legendary Ottoman engineer Hezârfen Ahmed Çeleb launched himself from the Galata Tower of Constantinople and made it across the Bosphorus, a flight of some two miles. For this, he laid claim to a reward of 1000 gold dinars and one of history’s first channel crossings. According to Evliya Çelebi, who wrote in the late 1600’s: “First he practiced by flying over the pulpit of Okmeydani eight or nine times with eagle wings, using the force of the wind. Then, as Sultan Murad Khan was watching from the Sinan Pasha mansion at Sarayburnu, he flew from the very top of the Galata Tower and landed in the Doğancılar square in Üsküdar, with the help of the south-west wind. Then Murad Khan granted him a sack of golden coins, and said: ‘This is a scary man. He is capable of doing anything he wishes. It is not right to keep such people,’ and thus sent him to Algeria in exile. He died there”.
Left: Triptych of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, by Hieronymus Bosch, 1505, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon, Portugal
Centre: The Ship of Fortune by François de Moulins, miniature by Guillaume Leroy, 1510. The miniature shows the author adroitly posed atop the mast of the ship of Fortune, composing his treatise.
Right: Icarus and his descendants
A. Daedalus and Icarus escape, engraving by Jean Bouchet, 1500s
B. The Fall of Icarus, Jan Breughel the Elder,
C. Detail
D. Daedalus and Icarus, Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, 1869
E. Lament For Icarus, Herbert Draper, exhibited in 1898
F. Greek postage stamp
G. Stained glass window showing Eilmer, installed in Malmesbury Abbey in 1920
H. The Flying Tailor poses for the camera in his ill-inspired and ill-fated flying suit.
I. Statue of Abbas ibn-Firnas, Baghdad International Airport.
However, with the dawn of the Enlightenment and the expansion of science, it all suddenly appeared not just fanciful and mythological, but plausible.
More than a century before the Montgolfier brothers, Francesco Lana-Terzi (1631-1687), a Jesuit priest and professor of mathematics in Ferrara, Italy, took his ideas to the drawing board. In his treatise Prodromo: Overo, Saggio di alcune inventioni
nuove premesso all’Arte maestra” published in 1670, Lana describes an airship that would be raised by four spheres of wafer-thin copper from which the air had been evacuated. Lana never built his air ship, explaining “... that God would surely never allow such a machine to be successful, since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind. Where is the man who can fail to see that no city would be proof against his surprise, as the ships at any time could be maneuvered over its public squares and houses? Fortresses, and cities could thus be destroyed, with the certainty that the aerial ship could come to no harm, as iron weights, fireballs and bombs could be hurled from a great height.”
He concluded, apparently without irony, that he would have willingly built such a ship:”... before publishing these my inventions, had not my vows of poverty prevented my expending 100 ducats , which sum at least would be required to satisfy so laudable a curiosity”.
In “L’Histoire comique contenant les états et empires du soleil”, also published in 1670, Cyrano de Bergerac has Dyrcona escape from Toulouse aboard a vessel only fractionally less fanciful, powered by a sail and an icosahedron mounted atop what looks suspiciously like a TARDIS telephone booth – Diderot meets Doctor Who.
Left: Lana’s Flying Machine
A. Francesco Lana-Terzi’s “Prodromo: Overo, Saggio di alcune inventioni
nuove premesso all’Arte maestra”, Brescia,1670. The musical notations on the facing page are part of a system of ciphers proposed by the Jesuit polymath.
B. Engraving of Lana-Terzi’s airship from a German publication
C. English engraving: An Air Balloon, 1st March 1789, published by John Sewell
D. Lana’s Flying Machine, from ‘Wonderful Balloon Ascents or the Conquest of the Skies’, by Fulgence Marion, published circa 1870
E. “Flying Ship” of Francesco de Lana, W. D. & H. O. Wills’s cigarette card, circa1909-1912
Centre: Illustration from “L’Histoire comique contenant les états et empires du soleil”, one of the first-ever science fiction novels, by Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-55). The story is a first-hand account of travels to the Sun and the Moon, and the societies the narrator discovers. The content was judged scandalous at the time; a carefully expurgated edition was only published after the author’s death.
Portrait of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Right: A Flying Ship, from Issue No. 56 of the Evening Post, 20-22nd December, 1709
In an issue of the London Evening Post, dated December 20-22nd 1709, readers may have raised a quizzical eyebrow or two at this article:
‘Father Bartholomew Laurent says that he has found out an Invention, by the Help of which one may more speedily travel through the Air than any other Way either by Sea or Land, so that one may go 200 Miles in 24 Hours; send Orders and Conclusions of Councils to Generals, in a manner, as soon as they are determined in private Cabinets; which will be so much the more Advantageous to your Majesty, as your Dominions lie far remote from one another, and which for want of Councils cannot be maintained nor augmented in Revenues and Extent.
Merchants may have their Merchandize, and send Letters and Packets more conveniently. Places besieged may be Supply’d with Necessaries and Succours. Moreover, we may transport out of such Places what we please, and the Enemy cannot hinder it:
The Portuguese have Discovered unknown Countries bordering upon the Extremity of the Globe: And it will contribute to their greater Glory to be Authors of so Admirable a Machine, which so many nations have in vain attempted.
Many Misfortunes and Shipwrecks have happened for want of Maps, but by this Invention the Earth will be more exactly Measur’d than ever, besides many other Advantages worthy of your Majesty’s Encouragement.
But to prevent the many Disorders that may be occasioned by the Usefulness of this Machine, Care is to be taken that the Use and full Power over the same be committed to one Person only, to whom your Majesty will please to give a strict Command, that whoever shall presume to transgress the Orders herein mentioned shall be Severely punished.
May it please your Majesty to grant your humble Petitioner the Priviledge that no Person shall presume to Use, or make this Ship, without the Express Licence of the Petitioner, and his Heirs, under the Penalty of the loss and Forfeiture of all his Lands and ,Goods, so that one half of the same may belong to the Petitioner, and the other to the Informer. And this to be executed throughout all your Dominions upon the Transgressors, without Exception or Distinction of Persons, who likewise may be declared liable to an Arbitrary punishment, &c.’
Of this much-vaunted invention an engraving is given in the same newspaper, and is here presented to the reader, who may probably be equally amused by the figure delineated, and the explanation of its uses, as subjoined.
An Explanation of the Figure.
A. Represents the Sails wherewith the Air is to be divided, which turn as they are directed.
B. The Stern to govern the Ship, that She may not run at random.
C. The Body of the Ship, which is formed at both ends Scollopwise; in the concavity of Each is a pair of Bellows, which must be blown when there is no Wind.
D. Two Wings which keep the Ship upright.
E. The Globes of Heaven and Earth containing in them Attractive Virtues. They are of Metal, and serve for a Cover to two Loadstones, placed in them upon the Pedestals, to draw the Ship after them, the Body of which is of Thin Iron Plates, covered with Straw Mats, for conveniency of 10 or 11 men besides the Artist.
F. A cover made of Iron Wire in form of a Net, on which are Fastened a good number of Large Amber Beads, which by a Secret Operation will help to keep the Ship Aloft. And by the Sun’s heat the aforesaid Mats that line the Ship will be drawn towards the Amber Beads.
G. The Artist who by the help of the Celestial Globe, a Sea Map, and Compass, takes the Height of the Sun, thereby to find out the spot of Land over which they are on the Globe of the Earth.
H. The Compass to direct them in their Way.
I. The Pulleys and Ropes that serve to hoist or Furl the Sails.
Bartolomeu de Gusmão (the Father Bartholomew Laurent from the London article) presented his most curious petition to King John V of Portugal, soliciting a privilege - the 18th-century equivalent of a patent - for his invention of the airship. According to contemporary witnesses, Gusmão made modest flights from hilltops with his invention; but a public test of the machine, which was set for June 24, never took place.
Despite all logic, leaping off high places with wings attached remained in vogue for two centuries more. The “Flying Tailor” Franz Reichelt attempted a flight off the first platform of the Eiffel Tower in Paris in February 1912. His contraption failed and he plummeted some 190 feet to his death. Watching the footage of his last moments (what an opportunity for the cinematographer!), where he works his way prudently out on a girder and finally leaps off, it is hard to imagine what must have been happening in his mind. You want to reach out, grab him firmly by the arm and steer him back to safety. As for the competent authorities, they did nothing of the sort, except rush his broken corpse to a local hospital.
Once man had actually achieved flight, largely due to a fuller understanding of the nature of air, however, air ships became ship-shaped once more; Purely “scientific” fantasy flying ships become whimsical and fanciful, contraptions à la Professor Branestawm, and filed a separate flight plan.
Gustave Doré depicts the Baron of Munchausen aiming for the moon at the helm of a conventional sailing ship, conventional except for the fact it can travel through space. Magic was back. (And back to stay, though even with fantasy, we live in a scientific age, partitioning the ineffable into genres: fantasy plain, high, historical or heroic, steampunk, faerie, and more.)
Left: Baron Munchausen sets sail for the Moon. Woodcut by Gustave Doré for “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” by Rudolph Erich Raspe, 1862
Centre: Flights of Whimsy
A. “Poisson Aerostatique”, engraving by Jacques Chereau, 10th March 1784
B. “Le Veritable navigateur aerien: Aerostat en forme de navire”, French, 18th century
C. “The engineer of the Leviathan finding, in the course of a dream, the means to propel his ship.” Lithograph by Honoré Daumier, published by the Maison Martinet, 19th century.
D. “La Minerve: Vaisseau Aérien destiné aux Découvertes” Engraving dated 1803.
E. “Aerostate de Poste”, an early version of air mail. This may seem whimsical, but Bill Bryson recounts, in his inimitable and irreverent memoire “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”, that in 1959, the United States Postal Service experimented with sending air mail by missile. The Postmaster General declared the operation “of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world”, and optimistically predicted that “before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.” One hopes delivery was not directly to one’s door.
F. Moon Carriage, from “Altre Scoverte Fatte Nella Luna dal Sigr. Herschel”, Leopoldo Galuzza & Gaetano Dura, Naples, 1836. Extraordinary discoveries were credited to Herschel – without his knowledge – and hoaxes flourished on both sides of the Atlantic.
G. Flying ship, cartoon from an edition of Barker’s Komic Picture Souvenir, circa 1906. But where indeed is the Captain’s pet owl?
H. “A New Prospective Way of Crossing the Atlantic Ocean” – and for selling Barker’s products for practically every imaginable complaint. We grouse about invasive advertising now, back in the “good old days” it was not so different.
Right: Illustrations by Léon Benett for “Robur-le-Conquérant”, from Jules Verne’s “Les Voyages Extraordinaires”, published in 1886. (It is also known under the title ‘Clipper of the Clouds’, from the first British edition of 1887, Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, London.)
Cover illustration by Don Perlin for a Classics Illustrated edition of Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror. (I devoured these comics when I was young, and shudder in retrospect at the massacre of graphic mediocrity and literary abridgement they constituted. Not in the remotest way did they instill in my young mind a predisposition for the “classics” themselves. I know that they are now ardently collected, which just goes to show that nostalgia has little to do with quality, simply with relative caducity.)
Jules Verne has many flying ships, but they are of the modern kind, bristling with propellors and sheathed in sheet metal. Many of the illustrations for Verne’s copious opus are by the prolific and sure hand of Léon Benett (1839-1917), who provided woodcuts for more than half of the 5 dozen novels that make up Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, nearly 2000 in all. (His real name was Benet - with one “t” - but he added another “t” so that his name would not be indentical to the French word for simpleton.) Benett also illustrated books by Hugo, Erkmann Chatrian, Tolstoy and Camille Flammarion, among others.
The Flying Dutchman flies before the storm, not through the airs, though the legend, which is of curiously undetermined and foggy origins (as befits a ghost ship) has inspired some haunting imagery. (The only painter who depicts the Dutchman in full flight is Carl Barks; whether he had his tongue set as firmly in his cheek as his rudder is set skyward is impossible to fathom.)
Left: The Flying Dutchman
A. The Flying Dutchman, Albert Pinkham Ryder, circa 1887
B. The Flying Dutchman, anonymous engraving
C. The Flying Dutchman, woodcut by Elbridge Kingsley, copy after Albert Pinkham Ryder, published in 1887
D. The Flying Dutchman, from an old German print.
E. The Flying Dutchman, by Hermann Hendrich
F. The Flying Dutchamn finally takes to the air. Painting by Carl Barks (1901 – 2000)
Centre: Flights of Fancy
A. Illustration by Florence Harrison for “Elfin Song”, a book of verse published in 1912 by Blackie and Son, Ltd. A ship between water and aether.
B. The Simpleton discovers the flying ship, illustration by H. J. Ford (1844 – 1912) from “The Flying Ship”, a Russian fairy tale published in The Yellow Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, Longmans, Green & Co., London & New York, 1906
C. The comrades in the flying ship meet the drinker
D. Navies of Barsoom, illustration from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels
E. Painting by J. Allen St. John for Burroughs’ “The Gods of Mars”
F. Frank Frazetta’s much-imitated but never equaled Galleon, itself following in the wake of a stirring genre of its own
Right: Illustrations from William M. Timlin’s “The Ship that Sailed to Mars”, George G. Harrap and Company Limited, London, November 1923
Other flying ships, which owe little to logic and much to fantasy, take flight in illustration’s Golden Age, under the delicate brush of Florence Harrison, or the deft strokes of H. J. Ford’s pen illustrations for the Russian fairy tale “The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship”, published in Andrew Lang’s The Yellow Fairy Book, in 1906. (Arthur Ransome, he of the well-known but recognizably terrestrial sailing stories for children, through his experiences as Russian correspondent/journalist around the time of the Great War and the revolution, also included this story in his own book ‘Old Peter’s Russian Tales’ (1916). The accompanying illustrations are sadly rather prosaic, with the depicted ship remaining stubbornly anchored on the waves rather than in the clouds.)
But perhaps no one more than South African architect William M. Timlin, in his magisterial and little-known book The Ship That Sailed to Mars, allies the wonder and elegance of the flying sailing ship. Timlin’s extraordinary book was published in 1923*. Only 2000 copies were printed. It is now as rare - and expensive - as it is beautiful and unique.
In many ways, flying ships might embody the path of myth-imagery of that particular sort that removes well-known objects from their milieu and sets them by magic in another. Carpets, boots, creatures, chariots, portals, wardrobes, all these are invitations out of familiar into the often perilous realm of faerie or the future (or the past, which has its own set of perils and rewards). The familiar vessel or garment eases the transition, the short step, though, has hidden consequences; one sets foot on the carpet or pulls on the boots, one climbs the gangplank to a seemingly ordinary deck, but instead of sailing with the tide, the prow is soon silhouetted against the stars.
Archetypically, they are the snares or the embassies of the gods, to lure or invite mortals to their realms, or to pass between worlds. Icarus, though, proves that pride and fall are act and consequence, one is not intended to fly without prior consent from those same gods. Christianity moralizes and diabolizes; flight is the province of the Devil, and witches are his stewardesses. Best to be a monk, or to be blessed with tolerant authorities if one wishes to take to the airs. Flight again enters the realm of the possible after the Renaissance, first in the obsessive doodling of an aging genius, then by fits and starts over the next few centuries. The Victorian Age sees ships in the skies, but with gears, steam and pulleys, not with magic, though magic does reassert its power and discards modernity in favour of a more romantic age, and from Illustration’s Golden Age another archetype emerges; the sky-sailing galleon, sails filled with solar wind, keel trailing stardust.
It is an image of exceptional evocative power, an archetype of transition and embodied disembodiment without mysticism or religious connotation, but evoking something simpler, something without the trappings of adulthood. The dreamlike quality is equally important; in the unfettered state of sleep, the mind could indeed take ship amongst those stars.
“…Give me the ships, with sails adapted to the heavenly wind; there will be fearless people, even if they face the immensity.” Eager Kepler was stargazing, suspecting he was before an immensity whose existence he could not yet prove, and poised to rearrange the visible universe. Give me the same ships, with sails adapted to the heavenly wind, and there will always be the quintessential reminder that when we were children without knowledge we knew many, many things about the universe, and instinctively understood our place within it. As adults, we easily forget: there is nothing childish about a sense of wonder and magic.
“White-sailed amain, till lost from view.
Cloud chases cloud across the blue
And shadow ships the race renew
In shadowlandӠ
Thanks to friend and colleague Nghiem Ta of Templar Publishing, for being there at liftoff when the idea took flight; thanks to Graeme Skinner for helping unearth much lofty imagery, and special thanks to Ann Carling for keeping a sharp eye from the crow’s-nest.
*The Ship That Sailed to Mars will be republished this autumn, by Dover Books’ imprint Calla Editions. With a new introduction. Of which, more in September.
† Excerpt from “Shadowland” by P. Morgan Watkins, Pall Mall Magazine, vol. V, January 1895
Posted by John on 15/07/11 | 07:00 PM | Chronicles
THE DREAM OF EMESE
Or An Intricate Intertwining of Threads
Many months ago, while investigating – if investigating is not too diligent-sounding a term for my somewhat directionless wanderings on the track of some mythological creature or other across the marches of cultural history – those wonderful places in time and geography where ancient cultures meet and exchange the greatest gift: the transference of elements of their beliefs from one to another, I stumbled across iconography all but identical from Persia and Hungary. I promptly sent a note to a friend and colleague from Budapest, asking if the tale of the Dream of Emese might ring a bell.
Yes, was the reply, a little, it just happens to be one of the founding myths of the Magyar people. (A parenthesis, here, if you will; as a child, I collected stamps, as most kids did at some point, and one of our neighbours would give me stamps he received from Eastern Europe, a land so far away it seemed mythological to me. Many were labeled “MAGYAR” in bold letters. I puzzled over them, a map of Europe before me, but such were atlases at the time, bereft of the names of nations’ own names for themselves, and the Magyars eluded me. Later, stamps lost their interest, but I’ve never forgotten that mysterious nation I could not find but nevertheless issued stamps.)
Like all founding myths, it is many things, and in many layers. We tend to read them as folklore, and catalogue them as anecdotal, so I’m grateful to Imola for her text; a reminder that there are always deeper meanings, should we care to look. Or follow the flight of birds against the sky.
Emese Álma — The Dream of Emese
“When the wife of Ugek lowered her head onto the cushions in her yurt, a bird of prey, a Turul, appeared in her dream and inseminated her. Upon this a stream of crystal-clear water started to flow from her groin, and swelling in its way, flooded extensive lands of rich pasture and lush forest. From her womb a host of kings arose, whose glory was unmatched over land and sea.”
“When the child was born, he was given the name Álmos, Dreamer, for his arrival was heralded by a dream. His own son, Árpád conquered the land that bred many a Holy King from the dynasty of Emese.”
The Hungarian origin myth, recorded around 1360 A.D., unifies ancient shamanistic beliefs and medieval Christianity in a state of peaceful co-existence. It attributes the Christian Holiness of Hungarian kings to a sacred totem belonging to the nomadic past of the Eurasian steppe. 400 years had passed since the birth of Álmos; the Hungarian tribes were a thing of the past, the nation was settled and baptized, the king had been brought up in the Western knightly tradition, and the administrative units of the country were based on the dioceses. Yet in the royal court, without a seeming disparity, the author of the Chronica Hungaroroum gave credence to the established kingdom in a shamanistic framework of pagan animal cult.
This cult was shared by many a Eurasian nation in the times when Magyars were still a semi-nomadic migrating tribe. Artisan artifacts offer the most convincing proof in this regard; fascinating similarities in the depictions of the same mythological scenes from the most remote West-Asian locations, thousands of miles apart. The scene on a golden jug found in an ancient Hungarian settlement distinctly parallels the decoration of a Persian plate, down to the smallest detail. The scene is of a naked woman held by a large bird: it illustrates Emese’s dream, without a doubt… or another one of a league of similar occurrences scattered across the Eurasian territories. The dream of the ancient mother, whose impregnation by a mighty bird of prey led the nation to prosperity and grandeur, is a dream that seems to link together nations that live half a word apart.
The mother of the Persian king, Cyrus the Great, saw just about the same dream as Emese. The stream flowing from her womb swelled into a great river that flew through entire Asia and into the sea. The Khazar origin myth features the same episode of insemination, except the bird is an owl in that instance, with twin brothers born to the human mother (a resonance, perhaps, with Romulus & Remus? Isn’t it fascinating that they were also nursed by an animal?). With some tribes, the belief still holds that the very first shaman was borne by a human mother, who, in turn, had been impregnated by an eagle.
On a personal level, it’s a special source of delight for me that these cultures seem to have had a degree of matriarchal thinking, equating the woman with the root of all things great and noble… and marking her as the source of the family, the smallest and most basic unit of these tribal cultures. (It merits a parenthesis that the word “source” can be taken word for word in this case: the fertility stream flowing from Emese’s groin is “source” translated into a literal image. Let’s not overlook the word “root” either: it hints at the world tree, the center of the shamanistic tradition. It is fascinating how much of these archetypal images we still carry in our culture and language, be it in an Anglo-Saxon or a Eurasian context.)
A. Golden jug, a piece of the famed Nagyszentmiklós treasure, unearthed in the 18th century. The Turul holding a naked woman in its claws is well discernible.
B. A Persian plate depicting what appears to be the same mythological motif—in the setting of a different culture.
C. Emese in a 20th century illustration by Gyula László, a well respected Historian. The accuracy of the representation is therefore granted.
D. A black and white illustration of the dream scene by the same historian. Notice the cameo of the golden jug in the background.
A quick look into the migration routes of the Hungarian tribes reveals a possible explanation for these shared mythological images. As the semi-nomadic tribes wandered, they were frequently in contact with each other as well as other cultures that happened to be settled in their path. This led to occasional merging or temporary co-habitation of a certain area. Consequently, their belief systems and origin myths were exchanged and merged, too. The Hungarian tribes, slowly advancing from the Urals toward the Carpathian Basin, were deeply affected by Khazar, Persian, Bulgarian, and Turkic peoples especially. Totemic shamanism was the common backdrop against which their worldview was set.
This “pagan religion” was centered on animal totemism, the belief that each great family is descended from a wild animal, most often a bird. (It merits a second parenthesis that in this belief system the birds were viewed as yet-unborn spirits. It takes the metaphor another step further to envision these spirits perched on the branches of the world tree…) It seems, therefore, a completely reasonable justification for the leadership of Álmos (a historical figure) that he should be the offspring of the Turul, the hallmark bird of the ancient Magyar tradition.
The Turul, however, is not a figment of mythological imagination, but merely the sacred counterpart of a fantastically fast flying bird of prey, the saker falcon, Falco Cherrug, or kerecsensólyom. I believe the look of the word is justification enough for calling it rather “Turul”; but there is another reason, of course, to be found in the cultural enrichment of the Magyar tribes in the course of their slow migration.
A. A depiction of the Turul found on a small golden disk in Rakamaz, Hungary. The disk was used as hair decoration. This is a reproduction of the original damaged piece.
B. Turul, saker falcon, Falco Cherrug, or kerecsensólyom.
C. The Turul is a recurring and beloved architectural element in Hungary, here seen in the Royal Castle.
D. The Turul adorned the shield and banner of Árpád’s line of kings. This dynasty reigned till 1303. The illumination is taken from the Chronica Hungarorum.
“Turul” is a word of Turkish descent: the original version was “turgul,” another proof of the intermingling of the two cultures. It pops up in the stories of various ethnicities inhabiting the Eurasian steppe even today. Oftentimes they still erect protective pillars around their settlements, with a menacing Turul on top. (A third parenthesis is due: at least one wooden pillar had to be placed near the shaman’s tent. It is reminiscent, of course, of the world tree. Only those specially gifted individuals could become shamans who were able to climb the sky-reaching tree, which was recreated in the form of the aforementioned pillars or ladder-type constructions. Reaching its different heights corresponded to a foray into the underworld or the skies. If the young man was able to recover from this event of deep and high trance, he was fit to be a shaman, which was a position of substantial influence over matters of reigning. Climbing the world or life tree was also a sign of spiritual maturity and physical prowess in Hungarian folk tales, usually rewarded with a kingdom; but more on that at a later time, perhaps.)
A shamanic drum depicting the three spheres or realms of the world, centered on the world tree or (as the Magyars preferred to call it) the sky-reaching tree.
The Turul soars out of another central myth of the Hungarian people: the finding of the Promised Land. Árpád, son of Álmos, saw a dream of prophetic meaning in which the supernatural forces communicated with him. In the dream an army of eagles attacked the cattle and horses of the Magyar tribes. There was no way of keeping them at bay. At once a Turul appeared in the sky, and, darting toward the ground, killed one of the bulkiest eagles. Having seen that, the rest of them took flight and left the animals alone immediately. Then the Turul called out to Árpád and promised to show the land in which they might settle safely.
Soon an actual animal pestilence broke out in the camp and sure enough, the eagles landed on the carcasses and tore at them. A saker falcon appeared and fought off the largest eagle, in perfect consonance with the dream that Árpád suddenly recalled. He recognized the moment and ordered the people to dismantle their yurts: marching after the falcon, they reached the land that the Magyars would soon call their own.
And now comes the best part. The map below shows the areas where you may come across saker falcons. The yellow areas show the breeding territory. Blue is the wintering domain, and green is where they can be found all year round. What’s the biggest single unbroken territory where they live throughout the year? That’s right, the Carpathian Basin, exactly the site of Hungary. What might have happened in reality is that, inspired by the prophetic revelation, the Hungarian tribes (already on the move for centuries) followed a migrating group of falcons that actually led them to the territory where they normally nest. This was the final part of the westward movement; this is where they settled down and established a new country that came to be called Hungary.
Does this make the legend true? The details fit into the puzzle perfectly, right down to the element of the animal pestilence. Yet the real nucleus of the story is not its supposed veracity: it is the magnificent intertwining of truth and belief, myth and reality, coincidence and supernatural guidance, inferred facts and historical interpretation. An intertwining so tight, it is impossible to tell its threads apart, just like the woolen fibers of the felt yurt. Migration of tribes, flow of story and symbol, making of myth, writing of history; all under the fleeting shadow of a falcon’s pinions.
A map of Eurasia showing the range of the real Turul: the saker falcon. The area of Hungary is the only place in Europe where they can be found all year round (marked with green).
Text © Imola Unger, reproduced with permission.
Imola also has a most pertinent and occasionally impertinent and thought-provoking blog, which she herself qualifies as “sporadically updated”.
Today in Publishing.
The newsletter format being what it is, and Imola being in publishing, she has also redone her lovely article as a .pdf file, which you can download here.
Posted by John on 11/06/11 | 11:33 PM | Chronicles
A SHOULDER TO LEAN ON
Or Reflections by a Vicarious Southpaw
After a half a century of diligent draughtsmanship one would think that much if not all of the process can be taken for granted. (Estimation based on the point where I most distinctly recall encountering my first major difficulties in drawing what I wished – a recalcitrant cow* - sure sign that it would never be possible to be fully satisfied with a drawing, meaning of course that the only choice left was to spend a lifetime or so working on it.)
Until of course, you cannot use your drawing hand. Drawing hand, it must be said, which has survived all manner of inconveniences: an uprooted fingernail on the index, a thumb sliced open (6 stitches) with an imprudent utility knife, a middle finger crushed under an uncooperative and weighty rock (8 stitches, you could see the tendons), half the fingers paralyzed for nearly a year due to a pinched nerve (my handwriting, difficultly decipherable at best, degenerated into hieroglyphic inscrutability) and other minor mishaps, sprains and such.
This time, it was rather more seriouser, as the physiotherapist gleefully remarked, explaining with decidedly far too much relish that a screw could be put through my collarbone into the scapula in order to regain some modicum of mobility in the munted shoulder and going on enthusiastically about the irreparable aspects of detached ligaments. (“Munted” is a wonderfully antipodean and perhaps even kiwi-grown word, meaning damaged, dented and otherwise buggered up.) I felt like swatting him for his unseemly if professional enthusiasm, except I couldn’t bear to move the shoulder. A happily regular runner with some promise of improvement and modest physical fitness, thanks to an encroaching tree root which I swear did it on purpose, in cahoots with the one that reared up to clobber my shoulder, I wasn’t near so dapper as I’d been the day before.
And, of course, it’s NEVER the left arm. That WOULD be too easy.
So, there I was, with my right arm in a sling, but work to do, indeed, a film to design. Reluctant to let my erstwhile colleague, who still possessed two valid appendages, shoulder the load alone, I resolved to draw with whatever was left. Which didn’t leave a lot of choice.
When Peter asked “Are you ambidextrous?” I replied “Not yet, but I hope to be by the end of the week.”
I confess it was like watching a child draw, except I couldn’t take the pencil from his hand and show him how to make corrections. It was also rather slower, and no clever crosshatching, deft outlining or free-and-easy blocking in, it was all as tongue-out-of-corner-of-mouth and firm-grip-on-pencil as when I was drawing cows (or trying) flat on the kitchen floor at age 4. Except, as I glumly reflected, I really wasn’t in Kansas any more.
Drawing is as much in the hand as it is in the brain, although the knowledge of how it’s done is ultimately stored upstairs, much of the expertise has been delegated to the hand and arm, which have acquired a certain amount of freedom and confidence in the fulfillment of their duties. They report back, but they do know their job. Suddenly though, it’s as if they have been replaced by an apprentice fresh out of far too many theoretical classes, with clean overalls and a tool box he’s never actually opened.
And who’s got it all backwards.
Every line had to be conscientiously traced and laboriously followed. An elbow, totally lacking in confidence, had to be rested on something. The easy left-to-right flow of shading changed to a scratchy right-left simulacrum of the former. Heel of hand, which normally never touches the paper, was firmly anchored on the best Daler-Rowney can offer.
Drawing is an incredibly oriented process, we have a great tendency to place light and shading on preferred sides, to have character studies posed looking in a favorite direction. Shading is as much related to ergonomics as to representation of volume in space. It parallels, and often reproduces, the way we see the world. To have all of those things suddenly reversed is a troubling sensation. That, and using a hand that can’t draw.
But, it is still possible, because your mind and eye know what’s “right”. Slow. Very sketchy and ragged, but it is still achievable, though the effort is demanding – by the end of the day, I was REALLY VERY ready to head home (heading home which involved much hoping I would not get caught driving with one arm in a sling).
And in the end, an experience I’m not ungrateful to have had (or rather to have had forced on me: I certainly did not trip up on purpose), and for the obligation to keep it up for the better part of a week. The only problem is that the director loved the new style, so now I have to try and draw like that with my right hand. That’s not true. I just made that up, but I did put the dates on the southpaw sketches so I’ll recognize them later on: enforced tribute to awkward ambidexterity by a temporary leftie.
Strangely, “right”, “left” and “ambidextrous” all have different origins and ages. “Right” of course has all manner of connotations of rectitude, and left of weakness and other wrongs – strange how we should, as essentially symmetrical beings, transfer our duality and dichotomy to our own anatomy, as well as condemning generations of left-handed people to “remedial education”… More prosaically, it may just be that right-handed people outnumber left-handed at least seven (if not more) to one, and minorities always end up getting the short shrift. As to why exactly we are either-handed, theories abound, although it appears to begin already in the womb.
Historically, there are enlightened exceptions. The Incas considered left-handed people to possess positive qualities not given to the right-handed. There are others, but they are discouragingly few; negative connotations are unfortunately the norm. (The association with “sinister” in its modern form is erroneous. We are often retroactively condemned to misinterpretation by our language.)
Most interestingly, a recent study by the University of Birmingham shows that right-handed people use the right side of the brain to observe an entire scene, but the opposing side to focus on a detail within that scene. Left-handed people do the same, only everything is inverted. Which study, in all fairness, is only revealing something that those who draw have known since Lascaux, and is the reason most adults don’t draw near as well as when they were 4, drawing cows on the kitchen floor.
With either hand. It’s the tribute paid by a literate society to logic and linear thinking and to the confusion between drawing and writing instruments.
Speaking of hands, “ambidextrous” is only recorded from the 17th century, which begs the question of what were they called before. (I suspect “Witch!” and promptly burned at the stake.)
I did however, learn a new word: “cross-dominance”, which denotes people who favour right for some things and left for others. Perhaps all those years of batting and fencing left-handed (pitchers and adversaries hate it) were good for something after all.
The shoulder? It got better, thanks.
*Polly thus played, in her ruminative way, a major role in my life; had milk come from animals with less complicated anatomy, I might not have so early met that fatal combination of grand interest and as-yet insufficient skills to deal with it. (The passage from preoccupation to profession is a short one.) I never did learn to milk properly, though.
I also recall a distinctly similar episode with our son when he was small, except it was a hippo he couldn’t draw.
INSIDE YOUR ART
Just recently been added to a very classy Chinese web site called INSIDE YOUR ART. Not only is it a well-designed site, they were incredibly tolerant with me, as I took ages to reply to their enquiry, supply images, approve texts and just generally tried their patience. Thank you Sergey and Yulia, and thanks top Lizzy of Fantasy Art Magazine for precious help.
SMAUG…
…is back! And most comfortably ensconced on his brand new anthracite polystone base. For more information: Smaug the Golden.
YET MORE WORDS
Also landed a paid writing job, so have been moonlighting of late, but the text is done and delivered now, so it’s back to sleeping nights, and not waking up at all odd hours to jot down notes on whatever is at hand. Now of course comes the long wait until publication, some time towards the end of the year.
Speaking of texts, am also proud to have one in the catalogue of the current exhibition at the Laténium in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Here is a resumé of the exhibition L’âge du Faux. The catalogue is bilingual French/German, except for my text, which proved untranslatable, and is in English. (It’s about mermaids, a most serious subject.) It will be published in mid-June.
Posted by John on 15/05/11 | 07:00 PM | Chronicles
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