Friday, 13 April 2012
What I Did on My Holidays III
I looked at this Stubbs painting in the National Gallery in Washington:
and liked the absurdity of its title:
from which is missing the name of the only creature in the whole picture who Stubbs appears to have had any real interest in:
What a sensitive and noble face.
(I also liked this one, by the same artist, of a rather worried looking poodle, standing on a punt):
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This is a dead ringer for Teddy just before the unwelcome prospect of a bath!
ReplyDeletePoor Teddy - can't he remain part of the great unwashed? (I'm sure I already wrote this, but can't see it anywhere - no doubt it will now emerge and it will look like I'm obsessed with keeping Teddy dirty.)
DeleteIt's not only the horse that's being ignored; the more I stare at that Stubbs, the more the tree starts to look like a significant presence. It's huge, it's dark, it dominates the top half of their framed world, it hangs over them, expressionless, bulging, the branches reaching over the group like a set of tentacles preparing to bend around behind when they're not looking and grab the horse by the tail or slap Captain Samuel Sharpe Pocklington's hat off, or else in a minute the roots will surge out of the dirt, there will be eyes at the base of the trunk, and they discover that it's a demonic minion en route from one of Lovecraft's Elder Gods to a part of the Pocklington estate that defies Euclidean geometry.
ReplyDeleteIt's always intriguing to get a glimpse inside your startling imagination, Umbagollah - however, I maintain that it is the horse that retains the prize for sensitive and noble faces amongst the ones that are obviously on display
DeleteThe more I look though, the more I see what you mean - and what about that body of water? I suspect it's going to rise up at any moment as well.
DeleteI agree, the horse is the most expressive person in the picture. The humans look as though they're wearing porcelain masks. The tree has no expression and no face and that's part of the menacing impression it makes: we don't know what it's thinking, it might be frowning under there, it might be crying, it might be signalling to its minions; we don't know. That body of water might be waiting to see what the tree does before it makes its move.
DeleteSo here's a theory: this is a painting about spirit possession. The horse is the only free agent in the picture. That's why it has the most expressive face. The humans have been partly sucked into the psychic malignance of the faceless devil-tree, therefore their faces are half-way between normal human plasticity and rigid pure white porcelain. They are entering a state we might here label tree-faced, ie, expressionless. Samuel Pocklington is silently asking us for help. He can't speak; the tree might hear. The women, who have whiter faces than the man and who we can therefore say are more deeply under the influence of the demon-creature behind them, are possibly trying to poison the horse.
DeleteI haven't worked out the lake yet but it's going to fit in somewhere.
Now you've got me worrying about the horse. But horses are bright enough to spot poison and spit it out. That's the next picture in the series, I reckon - the horse, with his nose all wrinkled, spitting all over the women's dresses. At which point, if your theory is correct (a big if, you'd have to agree) the tree and the water might combine to engulf the lot. Actually, that makes it an environmental allegory - the earth or Gondwana or Gaia or whatever the thing is swallows up man and all his worldly goods: cue violins, the end. I wonder if James Lovelock is a descendant of Stubbs.
DeleteKnowing whether they were in cahoots or not (the lake and the tree) would make a big difference, but thanks to that lack of expression on the part of both parties it's difficult to tell. Is the horse facing two strong enemies in tandem, or two separately? Is the lake in fact a friend? Lake and tree are both part of that area of beings that people call The Natural World, but is that how they see themselves, or do they figure out these things differently? Do they say, "Well, I'm standing up, I'm a tree, and you're lying down, you're a lake, hence we have nothing in common?" Or do they overcome the puzzle of their physical dissimilarities? Does Gaia punish horses?
ReplyDeleteDoes Gaia punish horses? Now there's a question. Also, can you classify a body of water as 'lying'.
DeleteI suppose not. It's not as though water has anything to lie on or lie with, no back, no side, and it doesn't have any alternative but to be there in a hollow place, looking horizontal to onlookers, so "lying" must be the tree making a very exterior judgement and casting aspersions: here I am, the tree, upright and proud, and there you are, the water, lazing there, watching Days of Our Lives underneath a heap of bon bon wrappers.
DeleteI once visited the set of Days of our Lives. Although I've never actually watched the prog. I knew someone who worked on it. They did the takes over and over and over again. As if they were making great art. Perhaps they were.
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