What I Did on My Holidays IV

I discovered a whole lot of Vermeers, quite a few of which I didn't even know existed, (I had the idea that only about 30-35 existed anywhere), lurking in the Metropolitan in New York:

 (I think this chair appears in Washington as well, see below)

 Here's what the Met has to say about this painting:

 (oddly in an auction catalogue list from only 40-odd years after it was painted, the picture is actually described, rather unfairly I think, as 'A drunken sleeping maid at a table' - and it appears to have sold for a mere 62 gelders).

Here's what the Met have to say about this one:

 I don't know why I didn't record what the Met had to say about the girl in the picture before this, but this was the wisdom on the wall for this:

and in the National Gallery in Washington:

The Girl with the Red Hat, oil on panel, 1665

Girl with a Flute, attributed to Vermeer

 (I'm sure I've seen this carving on furniture in other Vermeer paintings, including the Woman in the Red Hat just preceding this one - and yes, it turns out that the Wikipedia article on the artist quotes a Time-Life book called The World of Vermeer, by Hans Koning, thus: "Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women" - I think at last I understand the comment by Gogol or Gorky or Chekhov that I read long ago, [so long ago, I cannot remember who actually made the comment], that the whole of life can be described simply by describing the room you are sitting in.)

A Lady Writing, oil on canvas, 1665

 (if you're interested in a scholar's speculations on Vermeer's fondness for painting people writing, here is an interesting link)

I suppose everybody else already knew this, but I was astonished by how modern some of these paintings by Vermeer were - that red hat one in particular - and also by how much Bonnard must have been influenced by the artist - see, particularly that one of the dozing girl at a table, from the Metropolitan Museum. I am straying, however, into another of my shameful confessions of a visual illiterate, in which I display my 'I don't know much but I know what I like' ignorance, so at this point I'll shut up, but not before pointing anyone who might be interested towards a copy of a document showing what a bargain a Vermeer might be, were it only possible to time travel - it is to be found here - and also towards a discussion of his work that, possibly stating the bleeding obvious a bit, pinpoints Vermeer's talent for 'infusing scenes of daily life with timelessness and profundity' and comments that 'few artists can claim the consistent level of excellence that Vermeer maintained' (van Eyck, Durer and Holbein spring to mind immediately as other examples of artists who achieve something transcendent through the pursuit of intense technical excellence, and others crowd after them, but still).


(I should also mention that 'Woman Holding a Balance' was also in Washington, but it was not new to me, which is why I didn't include it here - I am fairly sure that anyone looking at this blog will be familiar enough with the image not to want to look at my second-rate pictures of it and I'd already had a good look at it last year in Munich, where it was on a summer holiday [at least, I think it was the same painting).

PS I forgot to include this Vermeer, also in the Metropolitan:

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):

Styles of European Art

Children seldom show much compassion for their teachers, possibly because they rarely recognise them as fellow humans at all. This was certainly the case at the boarding school near Sydney that I went to. Mind you, many of the teachers there were, if not subhuman, certainly extremely odd.

There was Miss F-, the French teacher, who smelled of fags and whisky and regularly wore her dresses inside out (and also had a bristly upper lip and an exceptionally lavish but slapdash hand with makeup and usually snored throughout assembly, except on one famous occasion when the headmistress was listing the attractions of a planned fundraising fete – "Tombolas, apple bobbing, bring and buy and raffles", she was telling us, when suddenly Miss F-'s head jerked up and her scarlet slashed mouth opened to utter three words: "and mulled wine").

There was Miss S-C-, the choir mistress, who had spectacles like the bottoms of bottles, a wart on her nose and thick down like a duckling's all over her face, (her claim to fame was that, astonishingly - to me at least - she played the piano with her legs crossed.)

There was Mr B-, the history teacher, who confirmed all our prejudices about the English and the best place to hide money from them, by wearing the same clothes daily, growing progressively smellier as the term dragged slowly on, and who could be made to turn an eternally fascinating and increasingly brilliant beetroot colour, if skilfully needled over the course of a 45-minute lesson.

There was Miss G-, the drama teacher, who covered everything in her living quarters, including the lavatory paper holder, with bright pink frills. We knew this because she regularly washed all the different varieties of frill and hung them out to dry behind our boarding house - that is, until the day the whole lot got eaten by a gastronomically adventurous goat that had escaped from the nunnery down the road.

There was Mr H-, the science teacher, whose outward appearance was almost normal but who nursed a special gory obsession - resulting from an oft-recounted 'personal trauma'. The subject was one he unhesitatingly returned to in conversation and during lessons, no matter what starting point he launched from. I'm not actually going to go into any detail about what it was exactly he could not leave unsaid; it really was fairly sordid and I would not only be taking up his flame and running with it, were I to divulge any more than that, but also betraying other people very close to him. Oddly, my first ever visit to Sydney was made in the company of Mr H-, who took our class on a bus to the blood bank, where, inevitably, we watched him donate a pint or two of his own, (which, equally inevitably, led to him recounting, yet again, the story of - well, never mind, you really don't want to know, and we most definitely didn't either, although, sadly, we were very much a captive audience.) Luckily, the experience did not colour the city for me.


There was, originally in joint pride of place, although latterly solitary - her friend having died shortly after my arrival at the school, (although in no way as a consequence, so far as I know) - the school's co-founder, Miss C-.  Reportedly, Miss C- was genuinely amazed when my best friend's mother, glimpsing her in Sydney called out, 'Hello, Miss C-', without a moment's hesitation, even though Miss C- was standing with her back turned toward my friend's mother at the time. 'How on earth did you know it was me dear?' my friend's mother claimed Miss C- demanded in response. She was hard-pressed to think of a reply that would not seem hurtful. After all, it would have been impolite to point out that a diminutive woman with a man's haircut, a hacking jacket, jodhpurs and well-polished riding boots was not a common sight in the ladies' section of Sydney's biggest department store. 

Not all the teaching staff were, to put it kindly, eccentric, though. One - or possibly that should read, 'The one' - who wasn't was the art teacher, Mrs Chr-, a soft-spoken American, with shining, long, fair hair. Apparently she had once been married to a hotshot American art historian. At some point in the past though, he'd abandoned her – the rumour was that it had happened in the South Pacific, although, as he was an authority on European art, this didn't make a lot of sense. Anyway, wherever it was and whatever had been the cause of his departure, Mrs Chr- and her two fine-boned, blue-eyed, blond-haired children - who drove her to despair by huddling over her collection of slides of old masters, giggling pruriently whenever they found a nude - had washed up eventually at this snobbish unintellectual New South Wales school for girls.

Our lessons with Mrs Chr- always took place on Thursday afternoons. Sadly for her, our weekly trip to the tuck shop also always took place on Thursdays, immediately before her lessons. It was the highlight of our week - tuck shop that is, not art, (although I suppose you could argue that art benefited a little from tuck shop's reflected glory - we certainly hated it less than many other classes).

Directly from lunch, we would rush to the tuck shop staircase and there we would form a long and impatient queue. Eventually, a wizened member of the kitchen staff, (all of whom, as a result, presumably, of a collective rush of blood to the head, made the extraordinary decision to stage Salad Days one year - the resulting performance was one of the odder theatrical experiences I've ever had), would throw up the shutters that protected the tuck shop and we would instantly surge forward, jostling to hand over our sweaty coins and receive paper bags filled with sugar-based products in return.

Only then, once we had loaded up with our cloying booty, did we start to move in the direction of the Art block. Staggering under the weight of our purchases, (actually that's a bit of an exaggeration), we trudged up the steps of the building and into the airy wooden-floored studio where Mrs Chr- spent her days. Crunching on freckles (large chocolate buttons covered in hundreds and thousands) and nibbling at milk bottles (no, not the glass kind), we would find our places at the big paint-splattered work tables, taking our time to arrange our delectables and make ourselves comfortable, too drugged by sugar to realise how rude we were being to our teacher,  too thoughtless to see that our behaviour betrayed our lack of respect for her.

Finally, either once we were settled or when she ran out of patience, Mrs Chr- would get going, each week making a fresh assault on our indifference to European artistic achievement. She never seemed to lose faith that one day we would ignite with excitement, provided she reminded us often enough about the engineering feats of Brunelleschi, (wow, those hidden chains), and the wonders of Ghiberti's dazzling gates. Sadly for her, though, that never happened, at least not in my time.  Week after week our attention was exclusively directed not to the marvels of the Renaissance but to the contents of our bulging paper bags.

In our defence, I should point out that we were at least a docile audience. We never interrupted Mrs Chr-, which was, I hope, a small comfort. I admire her now for keeping going, when the only response she ever got was the sound of munching. She might as well have been preaching to a dairy herd - albeit one that that subsisted, judging by the mingled scent of licorice and something more sickly, on a diet of musk sticks and Choo-Choo bars.

I presume Mrs Chr- escaped eventually. I hope she did and that she did not regard her time at the school as entirely wasted. While the fascinating information on Fantale wrappers did occupy almost all of my curiosity during her lessons (to the extent that I somehow missed the information that Florence was a Renaissance city, leading me to ask my mother after a trip to England during which I went to a dance and met several girls who said they were going to Florence after their O levels, 'Is Florence a finishing school?' [to which my mother replied, correctly, 'Sort of']), thanks to her I discovered for the first time the artistic styles called Baroque and Rococo.

I'd never heard of either of these until Mrs Chr- introduced them into one afternoon's eating, I mean lesson. Perhaps that is why, even to this day, they've stuck in my head exactly as she said them. Even now, even though I have been told countless times - mainly by my mother, through clenched teeth - that this is not the correct way to pronounce them, in my mind they remain Baroque as in Coke and Ro-co-co, as in the first syllable of rowing plus cocoa with a final stress. Meanwhile 'genre', whenever I encounter it on the page, will always sound exactly as Mrs Chr- first introduced it to me - like jeneer, (pronounced to rhyme, more or less, with Vermeer)* .

I wonder if Mrs Chr- is still out there somewhere. I think she was only in her thirties then so by rights she should be. I hope she doesn't think that during her time at that school she achieved absolutely nothing. After all she left this lasting, if not entirely satisfactory, legacy with me.   

*Now I come to think of it, could these little habits of pronunciation provide the key to her husband's mysterious disappearance - did his exasperation lead to the downfall of her marriage? Is the puzzle solved at last?   

Gum Love

Last year I went to see an exhibition of paintings by Hans Heysen, a German who migrated to Australia in the late nineteenth century. Heysen's paintings fetch enormous prices - in fact, an old schoolfriend of mine used the proceeds from one, bequeathed to her by a godmother, to buy a dear little Victorian house in Sydney's Double Bay ( moral of the story - choose your children's godparents with care.)

All the same, Heysen's paintings have always puzzled me, because, despite their value and popularity, I have never liked them. Until I went to that exhibition last year, I could never understand why. It was only when I got the opportunity to look at lots of them, all collected together, that I at last recognised what my problem with them was.

Even though Heysen's representations of the bush - particularly  his renderings of gumtrees - are very observant and superficially accurate, it seemed to me that he hadn't accepted what he saw in front of him on its own terms. While trying to produce a likeness of the landscape of Australia, he was still attempting to shape it to an idea of how he thought it ought to look, which derived from the appearance of the continent in which he'd been born. He couldn't resist peachifying the colours of Australia and bosoming out the spikiness of our trees and bushes. He couldn't help nudging the utter muddle that is a stand of gumtrees into something just a little cosier and neater than reality. He couldn't help trying to make the bush charming, just like home.

But the Australian bush is not - and never will be - charming. It is messy and untidy. It is, at first sight, predominantly grey and dusty. It is crowded with trees that spend most of their time imitating slovenly drunks at the end of an evening, dropping their bark, like discarded clothing, in dishevelled heaps about their feet:

And it is all too easy to assume that that's all there is to it, to focus on the mess, which admittedly is worse than a teenager's bedroom, to see nothing but a blur of broken sticks and dirt, to mistake the riotous tangle of dull leaves and branches and layered bark for unattractiveness, especially when comparing it with the obvious prettiness of lush green meadows and hedgerows criss-crossing a carefully tilled valley. However, the bush, while not charming, is actually full of beguiling features; its charms are abundant but they are not always instantly noticeable. Its beauty is subtle, not cloying; it surprises you rather than shoving itself in your face.

Those trees in the pictures are actually a perfect illustration of what I mean: while the first thing to strike you about them might be the untidy heaps piled about their feet, they are also extremely lovely. If you divert your attention from the chaos at ground level and look upwards, the stretch of silken trunk that is the result of all that discarded rubbish is hard not to admire:

In this respect, the bush reminds me of those people you meet from time to time in life - well, I do, anyway - who at first appear grumpy and prickly and difficult to get to know but who on closer acquaintance (these people are usually work colleagues, I find, since, if it weren't involuntary you probably wouldn't bother to pursue their company) turn out to be hilarious, intelligent and invaluable friends. In the same way, the bush requires time and attention. Only then will it reveal itself, surprising you one morning by sending out shoots of new life from apparently dead branches:

covering dark tough foliage with tender new growth:

producing delicate flowers in the midst of detritus and twigs:

and, of course, creating delicate sprays of budding wattle, (no, I could not leave that out, despite the prominence I've given it in earlier posts - wattle is always too lovely to ignore):