My Inspiration for October 2020

One more wonderful crimson and yellow October is gone, and woe is me, for what good can November bring? It’s the doorway to dark months of misery and grey skies. This month I really enjoyed pondering on different aspects of autumn, the bright, vibrant and groovy autumn as painted in George Bellows’ painting “Autumn Romance” and the more grey, drearier side of autumn which makes one melancholy. I’ve been daydreaming about the Symbolists, both poets and painters, Bruges and dead girls in art, the gorgeous Marine Vacth in the film “Jeune et Jolie” (2013) and the film Beau Pere (1981), Nietzsche’s poetry was a new discovery for the this month.

“I think the most courageous thing to do today is to conquer ourselves from within—not blaming others.”

(Anaïs Nn, from The Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974)

“Romantic obsession is my first language. I live in a world of fantasies, infatuations and love poems. Sometimes I wonder if the yearning I’ve felt for others was more of a yearning for yearning itself. I’ve pined insatiably and repeatedly: for strangers, new lovers, unrequited flames. While the subjects changed, that feeling always remained. Perhaps, then, I have not been so infatuated with the people themselves, but with the act of longing.”

(Melissa Broder, from “Life without Longing”) 

Just Married – Peter Lindbergh

Picture found here.

Pic found here.

By @liberty.mai on Instagram.

by  liz west.

Picture found here.

 

Picture found here.

John Everett Millais – Portrait of Sophie Gray

“I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.”

(Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre)

John Everett Millais, Portrait of Sophie Gray, 1857

Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais painted his wife Effie Millais’ younger sister Sophie on many occasions; most notably in the beautiful painting “Autumn Leaves” and “Spring” which are both atmospheric, rich in details and colour, but this “Portrait of Sophie Gray” is by far the most beautiful portrait of Sophie that Millais has painted and perhaps one of the most beautiful portraits I have ever seen. Sophie is just gorgeous to me and her face is painted exquisitely, full of colour and emotion, poetry and music. Her rosy cheeks are like ripe crimson apples. In her blue eyes I see the sea; the sublime roaring sea with its storms and wild waves, you could drown in their blueness, so intense and so alluring, so mysterious and so enticing. And yet her lips, so cherry red, so full and so inviting of a kiss, are pressed together. She is silent and shall not speak. While her eyes intrigue the viewer, her lips make sure that all her secrets are well kept. There is a melancholy charm painted all over that face, face framed with masses of long auburn hair which seems to flow endlessly. Sophie was fifteen, going on sixteen when this portrait was painted and to me it stands as a border between her childhood and the girlhood that is before her, with all its mysteries and curiosities. There is a definite sensual touch of the portrait; her crimson lips and her slender white neck, so exposed to our eyes, and how coyly the white lace touches it. I see Sophie’s awakening when I gaze at this portrait, she is standing at the doorway and looking into the world that awaits her fills her with melancholy. Her deep blue eyes can already see into the future and anticipate the life’s woes. There is a heart woven on her dark blue dress. Who will break your heart Sophie? Who will fill your blue eyes with tears? Who will infuse you with sadness? You know you will suffer and you know it is inevitable. You cannot avoid it Sophie. When I gaze into her eyes, this quote from Charlotte Bronte’s novel “Jane Eyre” comes to my mind, it’s something that Mr Rochester tells to Jane when he gazes into her eyes: “I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.” Sophie, October’s child of woe, a Scorpio girl born on 28th October 1843, grew up to be a miserable woman, suffering from anorexia and melancholy. Despite the deep fear of marriage planted in her by her older sister Effie, both by words and through observation of her sister’s despair, Sophie did marry and she died at the age of thirty-eight, probably as a result from anorexia. Her daughter Beatrix died six years later at the age of fourteen.

Pretty Girls Make Graves – Beautiful Corpses in Art: Part I

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

(Edgar Allan Poe)

Paul Delaroche, The Young Martyr (La jeune martyre), 1853

American poet and writer Edgar Allan Poe famously wrote that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”, and no one other writer devoted himself to writing about pale, ghostly maidens and beautiful dead women with such a feverish passion. When I think of Beauty, Love and Death in literature, I instantly think of Poe, but what about the visual arts? I envisaged this post as a part one of a little overview of dead or dying women captured not with ink on paper, but in colour on canvases. The first example I’ve chosen of a girl – beautiful, young and dead, the winning combination for the utmost beauty, is the painting “The Young Martyr” by a French painter Paul Delaroche. This is probably his most famous work and it is easy to see why; the painting’s romantical and mystical flair is just mesmerising. A young Christian martyr is floating on the surface of the river, her halo shines so strongly with such pure golden light that the gentle ripples of the water of Tiber are painted in its yellow glow. Her hands are bound with a rope and only a flimsy white gown is covering her body. Her hair looks like that of a mermaid, and as we gaze at her lovely pale face, we might believe for a moment that she is still alive. She looks angelically beautiful, without a doubt. Delaroche’s beloved, adored wife Louise died in 1845 at the age of thirty-one and the artist was deeply miserable about it, so there is a personal connection there as well.

John Everett Millais, The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl, 1847

The next example is very different in colours and style. “The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl” is a very early work by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. His famous “Ophelia” was painted only two years later and there is a stark contrast between those two artworks. This painting doesn’t have the intricate, lush details nor the gentle melancholy of Ophelia, and the colours are not vivid and clear but toned down. The shades of black and grey, along with the simple, almost bare composition, add to the realism of the painting. The now lost inscription on the back of the painting said: “The painting represents an incident in Millais’s own life when he was sent for by people unknown to him, but who knew him to be a young artist, to draw a portrait of a girl in her coffin before her burial. The scene moved him so much that when he got home he made this sketch showing himself being asked to draw the girl’s portrait.” This could explain the sketchy style of the painting; it was done from the memory, unlike Ophelia which was carefully and patiently crafted. The dead girl’s face looks like that of a doll; pale, sad doll wrapped in flimsy veils.

Found Drowned, George Frederic Watts, 1850

While Delaroche’s “The Young Martyr” was painstakingly romantical and mystical, this painting by George Frederich Watts, “Found Drowned” is all but romantic. Watts is sometimes associated with the Symbolist movement, but in this painting he focused on a social realism genre because this dead, young girl washed ashore on the murky waters of the Thames is clearly a working class girl who had committed suicide because life’s prospects were bleak and it seemed like the only option. Is she not a working class martyr then? The painting was inspired by the poem “The Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood, published in 1844 and here are a few appropriate verses:

“One more Unfortunate
Weary of breath
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!”

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852

Millais’ painting “Ophelia” is perhaps the visual archetype of a young and beautiful dead woman in art. No other painting quite surpasses the vibrant and melancholy beauty, intricacy and magic of Millais’ Ophelia. Even though the painting is static and flat, I can really see her sinking gently into the water, as in a dream, while the moss is sighing and the reed is murmuring. Ophelia is becoming one with nature, her hair will mingle with the river, tangle with the reed, and flowers all around her speak of bloom while she is experiencing her death. The model for Ophelia was Elizabeth Siddal, the moody anorexic redhead lover and muse of a fellow Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her red hair, the gesture of her hands, that shimmering white dress, and not to mention the expression of ecstasy on that face and those slightly parted lips, it all adds to the ethereal magic of the painting. Ophelia’s beauty is captured forever on this canvas; she will never grow old and have wrinkles, her cheeks are feverish and rosy from the eerie and hot kiss of the Death and she longs for nothing no more.

Walter Crane, Lady of Shalott, 1862

The last example for the Part One of this post is a painting “Lady of Shalott” by a fellow Pre-Raphaelite painter Walter Crane. Seen from the profile, lying in the boat, dressed in silvery robe, her long wavy brown hair spread around her, Lady of Shalott looks like the dreamiest corpse. Her face is so pale and her eyelids closed so tenderly, as if a gentle kiss from her beloved closed them, and not death. One can almost envy her serene peacefulness. Would you not to glide down the river, towards eternity, not seeing the tree tops and birds above you, but feeling them and hearing them as if through a mist, because your senses are fading and this world means nothing to you no more.

Carl Spitzweg – The Intercepted Love Letter

Carl Spitzweg, The Intercepted Love Letter, 1855

Carl Spitzweg is a very underrated German painter of Biedermeier period. His canvases are filled with the strangest people; from fiddlers, butterfly hunters and poor poets, to hermits, gnomes and bookworms, it is as if he had an eye for the strange and the eccentric individuals. “The Intercepted Love Letter”, painted in 1855 when Spitzweg was in his late forties, shows a comical romance scene in a picturesque little town. A young student on the second floor is using a thread to lower the sealed love letter to a young maiden on the floor bellow. He reminds me of the student in Oscar Wilde’s tale “The Nightingale and the Rose”, desperately in love with a haughty young girl, prepared to sacrifice everything to have her, only to conclude in the end that love is a miserable lie, and return to science, logic and his studies. This girl bellow doesn’t seem haughty though; she is lost in her needlework, oh the tragedy, and she doesn’t even notice that the letter is arriving her way! But the older woman who is beside her is clearly shocked by what she is seeing before her eyes. She’s probably an old spinster who hasn’t received a love letter in her life, and how could she understand the young student whose heart aches with love? Two pigeons on the roofs are also there to further remind us of the love that is in the air.

Carl Spitzweg, The Garrett, 1849

Spitzweg clearly had a sense of humour and knew how to transfer it into a painting. A Romantic painter would have painted two lovers throwing themselves off of the cliff, or dying from love, but Spitzweg sees the comical side of the situation. In another painting, “The Serenade”, painted in 1854, we see a romantic scene infused with humour again. I wrote about that painting already here. It shows a man climbing up the ladder to play violin to serenade the woman he loves, but he isn’t a young raven-haired Latino lover, he is just an average guy and the setting if far from romantical. Painting “The Garrett” shows a pompous looking old man watering his plants. A young girl on the other window bellow is eyeing him with curiosity. I bet he is the kind of strange eccentric neighbour that everyone has in their street. And I don’t think I really need to point out what is particularly humorous in the painting “The Poor Poet”; everything about that painting is comical. What I am trying to show here is that Carl Spitzweg’s art may appear as “nothing special” at first, it has a humorous touch that makes it stand above the average genre scenes and sentimental Biedermeier paintings.

 

Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet, 1839

Carl Spitzweg, The Serenade, 1854

Lilian Westcott Hale – Nancy and the Map of Europe

Lilian Westcott Hale, Nancy and the Map of Europe, 1919

American painter Lilian Westcott Hale’s paintings are a doorway to the gentle and secretive world of femininity as she mostly painted interiors with women and children. Lilian was in Connecticut, studied at the School of Fine Arts in Boston where one of her tutors was William Merritt Chase and also Philip Leslie Hale who later became her husband. She painted many delightful interiors with wistful girls, but painting “Nancy and the Map of Europe” is my faovurite at the moment because it is so very simple in composition, but very interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Nothing excessive clutters the scene; Nancy is sitting on the chair, dressed in a pretty blue gown, with a book in her lap. The little porcelain doll is sitting on the floor and is dressed in the matching blue gown. A map of Europe, painted in soothing pastel shades, covers nearly the entire wall and the entire background. The scene reminds me of those long, golden afternoons spent at school which were so sunny and bright and seemed never ending; the sun coming through the curtains would reveal the dust in the air and the shadows would dance on the map of the world on the wall. This sentence comes to mind “The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil and sweet as childhood, slanted through the high, bright gymnasium windows.”, from Stephen King’s novel “Carrie”.

I use to spend many moments just gazing at maps; following the contours of the countries with my finger, whispering the names of the mountains and river, and imagining how beautiful all those places must be. The colours and the mood of this painting awake a certain nostalgia in me; for childhood, its simplicity, wonder and possibilities. Childhood, a time of hope, joy and possibilities. Nancy can be whoever she likes; all doors are open to her, she can visit all the countries that are shown on the map behind her. There is a mountain of books for Nancy yet to read, a plethora of experiences to gather. Nancy was eleven year old when this painting was painted, having been born in May 1908. She seems like a smart, dreamy and pretty girl in this painting, with her long hair, wistful gaze and that pretty dress. Who knows what dreams occupy her mind? What books fuels her fantasies? What secrets did she whisper to that doll on the floor? Little Nancy doesn’t yet know what a fascinating life she will have, even though the seeds of it were already planted. Nancy published her first story “The Key Glorious” at the age of eleven. A writing career,troubled marriages, emotional breakdowns, that is all ahead of her. In this lovely painting painted by her mother, Nancy is still a simple eleven year old and her head is filled with dreams.

Different Faces of Autumn; Groovy Landscapes and Wistful Faces

I love autumn for its richness, warm colours, falling leaves and its mystery, at the same time I loathe it because it’s the doorway to months of quiet, grey dreariness and winter’s misery. Whether you love autumn or hate it, I feel that no other season of the year has the power to touch us in such a peculiar and poignant way. Anguish of transience weighs on my soul as I gaze at the leaves falling down and the trees becoming more bare as each day passes. There’s something final about it, a sense of ending… No other season has such bittersweet duality; golden afternoons and dark overcast days, leaves rustling under foot and morbid silence of a hard, dry soil; the last ecstasy of colours and sights, and the most dreary sense of an end.

George Bellows, Romance of Autumn, 1916

George Bellows is mostly remembered in relation to the Ashcan group of artists and he was known for portraying the grim reality of the big city, but his painting “Romance of Autumn” is intensely vibrant and groovy and brings out this whimsical, warm side of autumn. The painting shows a woman in white and a man in blue climbing over the rocks and in front of their eyes a magical landscape painted int the most exquisite, intense, uplifting, electrifying magical colours; purples, electric blue, pink, orange and blue. Each colours shines and smiles as in a dream. The gesture of the girl holding the man’s hand seems symbolic; she is helping him climb up the rocks and see for himself the fantastical landscape that she is seeing, she is inviting him to step into the autumnal fantasy with her. This is the dream, this is the autumn seen through rose-tinted glasses.

O. Louis Guglielmi, Connecticut Autumn, 1937

Guglielmi was born in Cairo, spent his early childhood in Milano and Geneva, and in 1914 destiny took his over the ocean. His painting “Connecticut Autumn”, painted in the depressing decade of 1930s, shows a very different face of autumn; the face of desolation, decay and poverty. Despite of their warm orange and yellow colours, the buildings beside the road look desolate and abandoned. The whole scene reeks of alienation, as if no human foot had stepped there for a long time. Unused blocks of marble lie around idly, useless and forgotten just like the town itself. No one needs monuments any more, nothing to celebrate and glorify. The figure of the angel is the only figure out of all the marble blocks. The thin trees in the distant edges of the painting look dead and unreal, and the young boy is the only living thing in this desolate landscape. His childhood innocence and naivety are a shield from reality. Decay and depression of his surroundings cannot touch him. He is flying his kite under the mournful gaze of the forgotten marble angel. But again the hope and optimism are crushed, for his kite gets tangled in the power lines. The sky is darkening and the angel is motionless and silent.

Marco Calderini (Italian, 1850-1941), Gardens of the Palazzo Reale, Turin, c. 1890-1910

This painting by an Italian painter Marco Calderini quite realistically portrays the loneliness of parks in autumn; when rains descend, the trees are bare, the skies are grey, and you can’t even sit on a bench because it’s wet so you linger around the desolate park, like a ghost, circling the statues and avoiding the puddles, and you cannot help but fantasise of the days, not so long ago, when the grass was green, the flowers bloomed and golden sunlight was coming through the lush tree tops. You cannot help but think of mortality and transience when you see that the trees are wet, dark and bare and the air is cold as the grave. Born, lived and died in Turin, Calderini’s oeuvre is filled with romanticised landscapes with poetic moods. Painting “Gardens of the Palazzo Real” is at once realistic and poetic. This is exactly how parks and gardens look like after autumn rains, and yet no one can deny the romantic wistfulness and loneliness that the scene shows.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, Autumn Regrets, 1882

John Atkinson Grimshaw was a master of portraying cold, lonely autumn streets where golden light of the street lamps falls on the damp pavements, wetness and mists. The painting “Autumn Regrets” perfectly portrays the wistfulness of autumn and that “what’s done is done” feeling. The woman is sitting on a bench, she is dressed in black and both her clothes and her pose speak of her deep thoughts and regrets. All around her the soil is being transformed into a golden-orange carpet of chestnut leaves. The wind seems to be whispering “This is the end, beautiful friend…” Regrets flood our hearts and minds so easily in autumn; we could have done more, and we could have done things better, or at least differently. But what is done is done, now the flowers bloom no more and every new leaf which falls from the tree is like a confirmation of the ending. Autumn has a way of getting under our skin, whether we like it or not. Autumn is a feeling, a state to be in, not just one of four seasons. And to end:

“This is the autumn: it — just breaks your heart!
Fly away! fly away! —
The sun crawls along the mountain
And rises and rises
And rests with every step.
How the world became so withered!
Upon worn, strained threads
The wind plays its song.
Hope fled…”

(Nietzsche, In the German November, 1884)

Fashion Inspiration for Autumn 2020 II

Awhile ago I made a post about my fashion inspiration for autumn and well, I found many more pretty pictures that I thought I’d share and here we are!

Pictures above are by Petra Collins.

Tavi Gevinson.

Picture by Laura Makabresku

Two pictures above by Natalia Drepina

Carl Spitzweg and Marc Chagall: Romantic Fiddlers

These days I was truly relishing in my ever-growing love of violin music, mostly through the sound of the British chamber pop band Tindersticks and their melancholy and wistful nineties songs woven with passion and yearning, but also through the compositions by the classical composers as well. A fiddler (or a violinist) is a very recognisable motif in the art of Marc Chagall and it often appears in his art over the years and decades. With my love of violins and Chagall’s art, I was delighted to see the motif of a violinist in a painting by a German painter Carl Spitzweg. These two paintings are very different, and I thought it would be fun to compare the different executions of the same motif.

Carl Spitzweg, The Serenade, 1854

Carl Spitzweg is a very underrated painter in my opinion because he painted a plethora of delightful genre scenes which deserve to be further explored. His art is not a flashy, sensational, provocative kind, but rather the kind which grows more beautiful the longer you gaze at it. “The Serenade”, painted in 1854, is one such genre painting. It shows a man climbing the ladder, I will assume, to the window of the woman he loves to play her a serenade, to seduce her and make her sigh with delight. He is seen from the profile, we can barely see his face, he is an anonymous, mysteries character; a romantic and a dreamer, caught in his act of romance by the painter’s artistic eye, but at the same time he is a plain, average man; he isn’t a knight in shining armour or a strong, young hero of a maiden’s dream. The somewhat monotonous colour palette may appear boring at first, but it is somehow very fitting. Brick wall and old roof tiles don’t particularly create a romantic stage for this serenade, but I think his humble simplicity only adds to the romance of the scene in some strange way because life isn’t always a perfect fairy tale, but it can have its magical moments. This fiddler may be an average Joe, but to a woman he is serenading he’s a maverick. Spitzweg always paints everyday people and manages to bring out their eccentric and quirky sides.

Chagall’s “Blue Fiddler” painted in 1947, almost a century after Spitzweg’s fiddler, is more red than blue; his face is red as poppies and roses and crimson hued as the love that the sound of his music must be creating. His wild hair and large eyes look poetic make him look mystical and dreamy, as if he were a nocturnal creature from some other world, fiddling away every night under the light of the moon. Chagall’s fiddler isn’t a man from a poor, shabby suburb but rather lives entirely in a surreal, magical, dreamy world of his own. Enveloped with the blue cloak of the night, above the sleeping blue houses, in the company of birds and a bouquet of flowers, this fiddler is a mystical, ethereal creature; he isn’t serenading his beloved, his is serenading the world with his violin lullabies. Chagall’s fiddler is universal and dreamy, and Spitzweg’s fiddler is a local eccentric, but both can make us ponder on the magic, seductive nature of music and the effect it can have on the listeners. Music, and art too, are a loving embrace that shield us from the world.

Marc Chagall, The Blue Fiddler, 1947

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: Mademoiselle Rivière

“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”

(Baudelaire)

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière, 1806

By the time this portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière was finished, she had already ceased to be. Some say it was soon after the portrait was finished, but nonetheless Mademoiselle Caroline was of tender age when this portrait was painted, just blooming into womanhood; in her white muslin gown she reminds me of a tender white autumnal rose killed by the first frost. Her youth, paleness and delicacy would have surely inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write his tales of death and romance. Caroline’s eyes are dark and clear and she is gazing directly at us. But still a certain shyness has coloured her cheeks in a soft pink shade. Her slightly elongated neck looks swan-like. Her figure stands out sharply against the serene landscape behind her, painted in muted tones. Even though the landscape shows nature in spring, the gentle greenness show the awakening of nature, Caroline herself possesses the eerie calmness and stillness of a winter landscape of frost and whiteness. The river in the landscape is meandering steadily and the flow of water can remind us of the flow of time and transience. The thinness and fragility of her white muslin gown, easy to tear and easy to decay in the grave, are contrasted with the strong mustard yellow colour of her gloves and the sensuous white fur. All this is suggestive of Caroline, whom the young painter called “the ravishing daughter”, blooming like a flower into womanhood, and yet this solemn coldness around her speaks of other things. And can we blame Ingres’ for being so captivated with Caroline? The painter was in his early twenties and why should he not feats his eyes on this delicate object of his painting. Caroline’s paleness and stillness of her pose is reminiscent of some older portraits, such as Parmigianino’s painting “Portrait of a Young Woman” (“Antea”) and this “Gothic”; slightly static and elongated portrayal of Caroline’s figure has also drawn comparisons to the art of Jan van Eyck and also to Piero di Cosimo’s portrait of Simonetta Vespucci who is painted with a snake wrapped around her. In the age of Neo-Classicism, the young Ingres received negative criticism for this style because Gothic revival wasn’t in style yet, but looking from our perspective today we know that this was just the beginning of Ingres’ success in the world of portraits.

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme – Hohnstein Castle in Saxon Switzerland

"I wandered under the branches 

Alone with my despair; 
Touched with a host of memories 

I fell to dreaming there."
(Heinrich Heine) 

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, Hohnstein Castle in Saxon Switzerland, 1827

This painting by a German Romantic painter Ernst Ferdinand Oehme looks so dreamlike and unreal that one would assume it is a mirage or a scene from one’s reverie, but no, it indeed shows a real castle splendidly situated on the top of the hill, vast woodland bellow it and only sky stretching on and on above it. The castle seems dream-like, and yet its forms are vividly clear and tangible. Towers and roofs stand out clear and sharp against the dreamy yellow dusk sky tinged with lavender and soft blue. The Hohnstein castle is stretched playfully over the huge rocks and the scene looks like something out of a fairy tale. One can easily fall into wild and romantical reveries about knights, damsels and troubadours. The fairy tale beauty of the castle contrasts with the rugged, raw beauty of the large rocks; man’s made architecture meets the untamed beauty of nature. In March 1825 The Crown Prince Friedrich August of Saxony informed the painter that he had bought a little property near Dresden and that he wished to fill his gallery with patriotic landscapes that encapsulate the beauty of German nature and castles. The painting was exhibited in 1827 and was criticised for its “picturesque” quality. Certainly compared to Caspar David Friedrich’s sublime landscapes that capture a whole scope of feelings, from loneliness to transience, this simple painting by Oehme isn’t so special, but I love it. Something about it makes me daydream and I think that a painting that can make you daydream is a good painting.