A
19th-century painting of a murderess concocting a poison to kill her husband’s
lover has been acquired by a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that hopes to unravel
its secrets. The Arts of Imagination Foundation, an organization dedicated to
the preservation of culturally significant archetypal narrative artwork,
purchased British portrait artist John Collier’s oil on canvas work “The
Laboratory” (1895) via a Christie’s private sale for an undisclosed price.
A
successful portraitist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Collier
painted in a Pre-Raphaelite style and was especially drawn to illustrating
scenes circulating around mysterious social narratives that encouraged
speculation and fueled debate amongst audiences. Known as “problem pictures,”
the paintings focused on characters caught in moral dilemmas that incited
gossip amongst curious viewers as though they were real scenes. Notable
examples of these works by Collier included “The Prodigal Daughter” (1903) and
“A Fallen Idol” (1913), which both feature women caught in incomprehensible
predicaments that inspired viewers to imagine possible explanations behind the
perplexing scenes.
“These
kinds of paintings were major draws at the annual Royal Academy summer
exhibitions, designed to be sold, certainly, but also to attract popular and
press attention,” art historian Pamela Fletcher told Hyperallergic. A professor
of art history at Bowdoin College, Fletcher penned an essay about “The Prodigal
Daughter” for the Royal Academy Chronicle.
“In the
1890s, Collier painted a number of fairly dramatic subject pictures drawn from
history or literature — ‘The Laboratory’ fits into this category, which also
includes scenes of Clytemnestra, Cleopatra, the Borgias, and others,” she
added.
In “The
Laboratory,” Collier illustrates a scene in which a woman and an apothecary
prepare a fatal elixir for her husband’s lover. The painting is based on Robert
Browning’s 1844 poem of the same name, which centers on the true story of
French aristocrat Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was
executed in 1676 for poisoning her father and two brothers and attempting to
murder her husband. When “The Laboratory” was first unveiled in 1895, it stood
out for its purposeful ambiguity, scandalous undertones, and Collier’s dramatic
use of light, which he often employed as a device to intensify a scene’s moral
enigma and suspense.
The Arts of
Imagination Foundation was founded by writer and director Brady Schwind, who
began tracking down the artwork behind Frank L. Baum’s Oz book series as part
of his Lost Art of Oz initiative. The organization purchased the piece to
commemorate the Gothic literary movement of Britain’s late Victorian period.
“As a
theatre artist and storyteller, I have long understood that stories bring us
together,” Schwind told Hyperallergic in a statement, explaining that he
launched the nonprofit last year to commemorate archetypal stories and the art
inspired by them. The nonprofit has created a virtual portal for viewers to
learn more about “The Laboratory” and its backstory, as well as Collier and his
work.
“Scholars
have sometimes attributed the late 19th-century interest in such scenes of the
‘femme fatale’ to a reaction against the increasingly visible and powerful
feminist movement of the period, as women activists worked to secure the vote
and other forms of social and political equality,” Fletcher said.
But Collier’s paintings, she continued, “showed modern women in ambiguous narrative situations (often around issues of sexuality), inviting viewers to draw their own conclusions about the women’s motives, histories and moral choices.”
The
Painting of a Murderess That Scandalized Victorian Audiences. By Maya Pontone.
Hyperallergic, September 25, 2023.
“It is a
melancholy fact that more nonsense can be talked about art than about any other
subject, and writers of treatises on painting, from the great Leonardo
downwards, have not been slow to avail themselves of this privilege.”
John
Collier
John
Collier was a British artist and writer who is known for his paintings and
illustrations that explored social issues. His works often sought to explore
the human condition and the plight of the working class. Many of his paintings
feature themes of poverty, injustice, and exploitation. He often depicted the
struggles of the poor and working-class people in England during the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Collier’s work was heavily influenced by the social
realism movement and sought to raise awareness of the hardships faced by the
working class. He was also a member of the Socialist movement and believed that
art had the power to bring about social change. His works often employed a
vivid colour palette and a focus on detail that sought to bring a sense of
realism to the subjects he chose to paint.
John Maler
Collier was born on January 27, 1850 in London, United Kingdom. John studied at
Eton College and Slade School of Fine Art. Also, in 1875, he attended the
Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. During his time in Paris, Collier studied art
under Jean-Paul Laurens. Collier’s exploration of social issues in his art was
varied and multifaceted. He was particularly interested in exploring the
problems of poverty and inequality, and he often juxtaposed the rich and the
poor in his paintings. His works often featured the plight of the working class
and the harsh conditions they often endured. He also sought to portray the
plight of those in power and their abuse of their position.
Collier
often depicted the working class in a sympathetic light, emphasizing the
hardships they faced in their daily lives. He sought to highlight the struggles
of this often-overlooked segment of society, and to bring attention to their
plight. In his paintings, Collier often depicted the poor in dignified and
heroic poses, emphasizing their humanity and strength in the face of adversity.
In his painting, “The Last Muster,” he shows a group of elderly soldiers
gathering for a final muster before disbanding. This painting serves as a
commentary on the plight of veterans and the lack of recognition they often
receive from society.
Brotherhood of Man
Collier
also used his art to address issues of poverty and inequality. His painting, “A
Peep into the Future,” depicts a family of four living in a cramped tenement
room. The painting conveys the struggles of living in cramped and unhealthy
living conditions, and the poverty that many working-class families faced
during the era.
Collier
also explored the changing nature of gender roles in his work. He often
depicted women in positions of power and authority, challenging traditional
stereotypes of women as passive and subservient. Collier also used his art to
criticize class divisions, highlighting the gap between the wealthy and the
poor. In his painting “The Cries of London,” Collier highlights the plight of
women in Victorian society. The painting features a group of women selling
their wares in the street, and serves as a commentary on the limited
opportunities available to women during the era.
In addition
to his artwork, Collier also wrote a number of books that explored social
issues. His most famous work, The Woman Who Did, explored the controversial
issue of free love and the role of women in society. His writing was often provocative,
and he used it to bring attention to important social issues of the time.
Collier’s
work was also highly critical of organized religion, particularly in regards to
its influence on the working class. He was a strong advocate for secularism and
often portrayed the hypocrisy of religious institutions. He also sought to
explore the hypocrisy of the upper classes, and often drew attention to their
lack of concern for the less fortunate.
John
Collier’s exploration of social issues in his art was varied and multifaceted.
His works sought to explore a wide range of issues, from poverty and inequality
to the hypocrisy of the upper classes and organized religion. His work was
highly influential in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and his vivid use of color and
attention to detail made his works particularly striking and memorable.
Collier’s works continue to resonate with viewers today, and serve as an
important reminder of the social issues that still persist in our society.
John
Collier’s Exploration of Social Issues in his Art. By Abhishek Kumar. Abir Pothi, January 27, 2023.
Britain is
not a country known for its great painters. In fact, I challenge my readers
outside the UK to name one. J. M. W. Turner or John Constable are the likely
choices for most people and that’s a fair claim. Both men are brilliant artists
and Turner’s work especially comes alive when you stand before it. However,
neither man is a patch on John Collier, one of my favourite painters, and I’m
going to spend the next few minutes convincing you of his greatness.
Life
Art
aficionados will have heard the name John Collier. How could they not
considering his extensive catalogue from the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras?
He has not had the same national staying power in people’s minds as Constable
and Turner.
His
grandfather was a prominent Quaker and Member of Parliament, and later made
Lord of Monkswell, a county in Devon in the south of England. His early life in
a successful family was unremarkable. He would marry twice, both times to the
daughters of famed British biologist and ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ Thomas Henry Huxley
— the man who coined the term agnostic and likely influenced Collier’s own
beliefs on religion. Had it not been for his remarkable skills with a brush,
John Collier would have faded into history, a footnote in the family tree of
minor English nobility. His skill though is beyond question.
The
Darkness at the Heart of Man
I’ve tried
for a long time to think what it was I loved about Collier’s work. Many of the
scenes are mythological or depict real individuals such as Rudyard Kipling
(author of the Jungle Book) or Charles Darwin, but many others depict people
who are no longer recognisable to us today, field marshals, surgeons and the
wives of rich men. Then, I compared his work to my other favourite English
artist, John Martin, who paints epic, often biblical scenes with a roaring
splash of vibrant colours that leave you awestruck.
It was
there that I found my answer. Collier’s focus on the individual leaves no room
to hide. You get lost in a Turner, Constable or Martin painting, but Collier’s
work grabs you by the throat and forces you to look. Take the below
Clytemnestra after the Murder (1882). For those that don’t know the myth, Clytemnestra
is the wife of Agamemnon in the Iliad and mother of Iphigenia, the daughter
that Agamemnon kills so that the Greeks can set sail and reach Troy. After
returning home with a prisoner and concubine Cassandra, the oracle cursed to
offer true prophecies but never be believed, both are murdered by his
grief-stricken and near mad wife, Clytemnestra.
Clytemnestra
It is a
horrific story, and it made for a horrific painting. Clytemnestra stands
defiant, covered in blood, drawing the curtain aside, inviting us to peer into
the darkness in search of her victims. But it’s the eyes that hint at what I
think is a one of Collier’s greatest depictions in his work — madness, darkness
and the unconscious mind. What Carl Jung would later call, the ‘shadow’, that
repressed part of our minds liable to burst forth at any moment, especially in
the restrained Victorian society of Collier. There is nothing romantic in
Clytemnestra’s eyes, no tormented soul to grieve for. We are peering into the
eyes of madness, a Lady Macbeth pushed over the edge. This is the raw
unconscious mind.
Lilith
This is
what I love about Collier’s work and what makes him stand out. Though his
subjects were not uncommon, famous individuals and mythology have been the
bread and butter of artists for centuries, the unease he gives the viewer by
the weaving of the unconscious mind into his paintings is electrifying. Lilith,
1887, the first wife of Adam. She is coiled by the snake, who is
presumably Satan, nude and almost caressing him with her cheek. To the deeply
religious Victorians, this would have been scandalous, yet Collier depicts a
woman enjoying her pleasures here. Lilith is shown to embrace her sin, her
darkness, and relish in the gratification it gives her. The conscious gives way
to the unconscious, the shadow rules.
As we saw
with Clytemnestra, unapologetic women are something of a theme for him. In
Circe, (1885), the sorceress of the Odyssey, the titular woman is nude beside a
tiger and leopard, alluring and enticing, curious about her observer and
inviting you to approach, while the darkness lingers in the background,
menacing you all the same. Lady Godiva, another quasi-mythical English figure —
an English noblewoman who rode naked through her husband’s town in protest of
his high taxing of the citizens — also shows these themes. Lady Godiva is
caught off guard by the viewer, her shame finally overcoming her in her private
moment, the unconscious recoiling at what she’s endured, yet she has defied her
husband all the same.
Lady Godiva
Perhaps no
two works show the unconscious so strongly as The Confession, 1902, and The
Priestess at Delphi. Too vastly different subjects, yet both oozing menace and
unease. The hellfire red of The Confession matches the devilish red of the
Priestess of Delphi’s robe, the light from which reflects downward, giving her
closed eyes an almost ember like quality. In The Confession, a man and woman
seem resigned to something they’ve heard, shattered by unexpected news, while
the priestess awaits her vision from the gods, the vapours of the temple
creeping through the floor so that she can receive their words.
Priestess of Delphi
In a
society shaken to its foundation by the work of Darwin, Nietzsche’s nihilism
and Freud’s unconscious, is it any wonder that darkness haunts the canvases of
Collier? Collier was himself an agnostic, following his father-in-law Huxley,
be he was no fool. God had left a void in man, just as he had left a void in
art and Collier filled that with the unconscious. His subjects are confronting
and do not explain their actions, because by their very nature they cannot. The
unconscious is not a rational being that expresses itself in neat Victorian
prose. It lingers, repressed in the background of polite society, threatening
us, until it bursts forth in the uncompromising stare of a Clytemnestra, the
sensual evil of Lilith, the shame of Lady Godiva, or the incomprehension of a
couple unable to bear anything but the dim glow of the firelight.
Collier
captured more than the landscapes and people of his contemporaries and
predecessors. He captured the unspeakable and unknowable face of us all.
John
Collier: Victorian Britain’s Darkest Artist.
The horrors of the unconscious mind. By A Renaissance Writer. Medium, March 16, 2022.
The
Honourable John Maler Collier (1850-1934) was a British painter and writer. He
painted in a style inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and the neo-classicists and
became one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. Collier
deserves a posting to himself on this blog as his image, Tannhäuser in the
Venusberg (1901), forms the cover of my 2021 book, Aphrodite- Goddess of Modern
Love. I chose the image for the fact that it represented one aspect of
Aphrodite- that of her as an independent and self determining female. In the
words of the Velvet Underground’s song, Venus in Furs, she is seen here as “the
imperious.” She may not be about to whip and humiliate Tannhäuser, as Wanda
would have done in the novel Venus im Pelz, but she nonetheless has the young
knight as her subject and slave.
Collier was
from a prosperous and successful family; his father was a judge. He studied
painting at the Slade School under Edward Poynter for three years, before
attending the Munich Academy from 1875, followed by a time studying in Paris.
Through his father, he was introduced to the established painters Alma-Tadema
and Millais, who provided guidance and encouragement. Collier first exhibited a
figure study at the RA as early as 1874, something which soon established him
as a portraitist. He also met his first wife at the Academy school. She sadly
died after the birth of their first child; Collier then, much against
prevailing convention and society approval, married her younger sister, a
ceremony which had to take place in Norway as it was prohibited in English law.
Interestingly, Collier’s greatest successes as a painter came from his “problem
pictures” in which he tackled social problems and the dramas of ordinary life-
The Prodigal Daughter (1903) and Sentence of Death (1908) speak for themselves.
An Incantation
During his
career, Collier benefitted from his social background to receive commissions to
paint a lot of the leading men of the British Empire, from which he made a
“comfortable if uninspiring living.” These pictures are a succession of dull
figures in black suits and khaki; his portraits of society ladies and children
are rather more appealing (he painted some 1100 in his lifetime). Far more
interesting and memorable, though, are his historical and mythical scenes, such
as Lady Godiva, 1898, Circe, 1885, Lilith, 1887, and Clytemnestra, 1882. These
can be melodramatic as well as colourful. His classical and oriental scenes are
without doubt vibrant and sexy, his heroines often being fearfully
self-contained and determined women. As art historian Christopher Wood rightly
observed, Collier had a “distinct taste for the theatrical.”
For such an
establishment figure, Collier’s views on morality and the Christian religion
were surprisingly outspoken for the time and his position was decidedly
sceptical about a deity. He was a forthright rationalist, once described as
‘quietly ruthless’ in his manner. Perhaps this was why he seemed to imbue so
many of his pagan scenes with such a vital spirit, as if prepared to concede
that their deities might be real, that their practices might be as valid as
those of the established church, that magic and prophecy might work, and that
supernatural entities might exist throughout the natural world. If nothing
else, the ancient ceremonies he imagined look lively and fun and he endowed his
nature spirits with life and charm, whilst his females and goddesses have a
quiet power and confidence.
As some
readers may be aware from my other WordPress blog, British Fairies, I also
write about British folklore, so that part of my admiration for Collier comes
from his frequent handling of native legends and stories alongside the
classical myths. As his rendition of Halloween shows Collier appreciated the
continuing emotional power of folk beliefs.
Many of
Collier’s images seem to stand outside any specific chronological period or
identifiable historical era. For instance, Stepping Stones, shown below, could
well represent a young girl of the 1920s, but her dress is vaguely classical,
making it possible that we can see her as yet another Greek naiad alongside the
Water Nymph depicted beside her.
For me,
there is far more vitality and interest in Collier’s depictions of myth and
antiquity than in most of his pictures of the great and the good of the late
British Empire. If nothing else, his imaginary worlds are places where women
wield considerable temporal, religious and magical power- they are all, in a
sense, a manifestation of Venus the imperious.
Suggested
further reading includes Christopher Wood’s Olympian Dreamers and William
Gaunt’s Victorian Olympus. For more information on late nineteenth and early
twentieth century art history, see my books page.
All Halloween
The
Imperious Venus- the art of John Collier, By John Kruse. John Kruse Blog Wordpress, November 24, 2021.
In the early twentieth-century, the “problem picture” became a popular craze at the Royal Academy exhibitions. Deliberately ambiguous—and often slightly risqué—scenes of contemporary life, these pictures encouraged eager audiences to offer competing interpretations of the puzzles they posed, both at the Academy itself and in newspaper coverage and competitions.1 John Collier’s painting The Prodigal Daughter, exhibited at the Academy in 1903, was one of the first and most popular problem pictures, sparking conversations about new roles for women and the purpose of art in the early twentieth century
A young
woman stands proudly—even haughtily—at the doorway of a humble parlour,
decorated with old-fashioned prints and a modest round table. The daughter has
interrupted her ageing parents at their evening reading, as the father looks up
from his book and the mother slightly rises from her chair. The prodigal’s fine
flowered dress and red sash are in sharp contrast to her parents’ drab
clothing, a difference emphasised by the dramatic lighting which illuminates
her unbound hair and gold jewellery, and plunges the older couple into shadow.
Visually
and thematically, the picture is a witty and thoughtful reworking of Hunt’s
“modern moral subject”, The Awakening Conscience, exhibited at the Academy in
1854. Hunt’s picture shows the spiritual reawakening of a “fallen woman”, who
rises from her lover’s lap as she realises the error of her ways. Collier
subtly reworks the furnishings of Hunt’s domestic interior: the piano, the
prints, the mirror, even the tangled skeins of yarn all reappear, but are now
dingy and old-fashioned. The elderly parents even seem to reprise Hunt’s young
couple: in each pair, the man sits in a chair, turned to the right, arm resting
on the armrest, while the woman reacts more quickly than her partner, caught in
the act of rising to a stand. But if Hunt’s protagonist’s spiritual awakening
offered a clear moral message about sin and repentance, Collier’s picture is
less comprehensible, not least because this prodigal looks most decidedly
unrepentant.
Reviewers
struggled to devise a narrative that would make sense of both the picture and
its seemingly religious title. In the words of one puzzled critic:
“ From the
title of the picture, it may be inferred that her career has been similar to
that of the Prodigal Son of the parable, but she has none of his repentant
humility, and has seemingly not been reduced to the straits which he had to
face.”
Viewers imagined various stories to make sense
of the situation, and as one reporter noted, “there is always a group gathered,
discussing the artist’s meaning and debating as to whether the bedizened young
lady is supposed to have just returned home or to be on the eve of departure.”
As they
worked to make narrative sense of the picture, critics grappled with the
changing roles for and expectations of women in the early twentieth century.
For some viewers, the very idea of a prodigal daughter still carried the sexual
connotation and inevitable consequences inherent in the Victorian idea of the
“fallen woman”. M.H. Spielmann described her in damning terms as a modern type:
“ the
Prodigal Daughter of to-day, whose feminine heart, once abandoned and wholly
corrupt, knows no redemption, but glories in sin, and is conscious only of
enjoyment as to the past, and as to the future persistence in the lost path on
which she has entered.”
But others
questioned both the reason for the daughter’s decision to leave home, and her
emotional relationship to her parents. Many critics suggested she might have
left home to pursue a career on the stage, and The Daily Telegraph added the
possibilities that she was a singer or a painter. The woman’s magazine The
Gentlewoman even interpreted the picture as a young woman’s justified rebellion
against a reactionary and unpleasant home life, describing the father as “a
bourgeois Casaubon” and concluding that the beauty of the girl’s face “is so
tempered by refinement as to suggest that her time has been spent in running a
tilt against convention rather than swine-herding.”
While
Collier himself never embraced the label of the “problem picture”, throughout
his career he defended his paintings as explorations of real emotion and
character designed to make viewers engage with the depicted situations. In a
retrospective interview, he looked back to “the first of these pictures of mine
that was dubbed ‘problem’”, and described his own perspective on the
development of The Prodigal Daughter:
“There I
undoubtedly tried to tell a dramatic story and, I think, a human one. There are
the eminently respectable lower-class parents, and there bursts in upon them a
flaunting beauty who, unlike the prodigal son, is obviously unrepentant. The
girl is unquestionably saying, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” The
father, perhaps a local preacher, is stern and unyielding; the mother is
bending forward, yearning for her child. There were, for me, many problems in
that picture. How to get suitable models for the three actors in this little
drama; how to make the room and its furniture expressive of the home life from
which the girl had broken away; how these people would have looked and acted,
and, a more purely pictorial point, what would have been the effect of the one
lamp which is the sole illumination of the three figures.”
Collier
emphasises the narrative and emotional power of the painting, but some of his
language also points to the changing artistic values of the early twentieth
century, as questions of colour, light, form, and facture came to seem more
important to at least some viewers than story or moral.
1903 The
Prodigal Daughter and the Problem Picture. By Pamela Fletcher. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition : AChronicle, 1769-2018. 2018
The great majority of narrative paintings refer to well-known oral or text narratives, but a few do not. British painters of the late Victorian period not only made a speciality of painting narratives which were not known to the viewer, but created a sub-genre of problem pictures, whose whole purpose was to encourage speculation as to their narrative.
Precursors of these problem pictures started to appear around 1850, but they became most popular and problematic over the period 1895 to 1914, particularly those of John Collier. These became popular topics of discussion among the chattering classes, and their debate and possible narratives were even covered in the press of the day.
This
article traces their origin, and provides a few examples by the master of
problem pictures, John Collier – whose Sleeping Beauty I discussed earlier.
William
Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The Awakening Conscience (1851-53)
Probably
the best-known precursor to the problem picture, and one of the earliest,
Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1851-53) shows a domestic conflict.
Originally, the woman’s face was even more anguished, but shock among critics
encouraged Hunt to moderate her facial expression to that now seen.
Careful
examination of the painting reveals many cues to a more controversial
narrative, of a ‘kept’ mistress and her lover in disagreement. There is no
wedding ring on the fourth finger of her left hand, which is a focal point of
the picture. The room itself is furnished gaudily and in poor taste, and
contains evidence of the woman’s wasted hours waiting for her lover: the cat
under the table (which symbolically is shown toying with a bird), the clock
inside a glass on top of the piano, the unfinished tapestry, and so on.
That said,
what is the underlying narrative? Is this just the regret of the ‘kept’
mistress, and her desire for a more regular relationship and family?
William
Frederick Yeames (1835–1918), And when did you last see your Father? (1878)
And when did you last see your Father?
Yeames’ And
when did you last see your Father? is set in the English Civil War, as
indicated by the Puritan dress of conical hats and plain clothes. This
contrasts with the opulent silks of the mother and chidren, who are clearly
Royalists. The young boy is being questioned, presumably as given in the title,
for him to reveal the whereabouts of his Cavalier father – an act which is
bringing great anguish to his sisters and mother.
Setting
most of the cues to the narrative in the dress and disposition of the
participants makes it a greater problem, although here with sufficient
interpretative information the problem is readily soluble.
William
Quiller Orchardson (1832-1910), Hard Hit (1879)
Orchardson’s Hard Hit is more difficult to solve. The
fashionably-dressed young man about to open the door on the left is walking
away from a group of older villains, who have stopped at nothing (including
perhaps cheating) to beat him repeatedly at cards, and have relieved him of his
wealth.
This is told well using classic Alberti techniques
such as facial expressions, but most importantly here by body language and
direction of gaze. Orchardson’s model provided the inspiration, when he arrived
dejected at the studio one day and revealed that he had been ‘hard hit’ himself
the previous night.
William Quiller Orchardson (1832-1910), The First
Cloud (1887)
His The First Cloud is the last of a series of three
paintings about unhappy marriage, specifically a young, pretty bride who
marries an older man for his wealth. With their faces largely concealed, the
narrative relies on their body language and physical distance. When it was
first exhibited, the following lines from Tennyson were quoted:
“It is the little rift within the lute
That by-and-by will make the music mute.”
John Collier (1850–1934)
By the 1890s, Collier was looking for something beyond
the portraits which had made him successful, and exploring different ways of
making history painting more relevant to the social issues of life at that
time.
The Garden
of Armida (1899) was an early attempt to show a traditional historical subject,
that of Rinaldo in Armida’s garden from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (see this
article) in a contemporary setting and dress. In doing so, he posed the problem
as to whether the viewer was to see some more modern narrative beyond Tasso’s
original. It was not well received, and Collier decided to try more direct
problem pictures instead.
The
Prodigal Daughter (1903) was far more successful, and remains one of Collier’s
best-known works. An elderly middle-class couple are seen in their parlour in
the evening, surprised by the interruption of their prodigal daughter, who
stands at the door.
This
immediately sparked debate over the role of women in the modern world, the
nature and scope of their family responsibilities, and changing class
boundaries. Collier went to great lengths to capture the expressed emotions, in
terms of the daughter’s facial expression, and the contrasting body language.
The daughter is seen as a ‘fallen woman’, thus part of a popular mythology of
the time. But far from appearing fallen and repentant, she stands tall, proud,
and wears a rich dress.
The
resulting discussion spilled over from art gossip columns into more general
editorial and comment sections of the press.
A few years
later, his Mariage de Convenance (1907) was another painting which received
extensive media coverage. In contrast with Orchardson’s early more obvious
treatment of the problem of marriages of convenience (which were often also
arranged marriages), Collier poses a real problem.
The mother,
dressed in the black implicit of widowhood, stands haughty, her right arm
resting on the mantlepiece. Her daughter cowers on the floor, her arms and head
resting on a settee, in obvious distress. Perhaps the daughter has been (or is
to be) married into money to bring financial security to the family, now that
the father is dead?
Collier
himself offered a slightly simpler version of that, when finally tackled by the
press, which omitted reference to the father’s death.
By the time
that Collier showed his next problem picture, The Sentence of Death (1908),
they had become established as a familiar feature of the annual Royal Academy
exhibition. This painting at first disappointed the critics, but quickly became
very popular. Sadly the original work has not lasted well, and I rely on a
reproduction made at the time.
At a time
when disease and death were prominent in everyday life, this painting might
seem quite ordinary. A young middle-aged man stares blankly at the viewer,
having just been told by his doctor that he is dying. The doctor appears
disengaged, and is reading from a book, looking only generally in the direction
of his doomed patient.
Unusually
for Collier’s problem pictures, and for paintings showing medical matters in
general, the patient is male. This led to speculation as to the expected male
response to such news, and questions as to what condition might be bringing
about his death. There was even debate about interpretations of the
doctor-patient relationship.
The First
World War changed Britain, and British art, dramatically. One of Collier’s last
problem pictures was Sacred and Profane Love (1919), which drew attention to
women’s problems again. On the left, sacred love is shown in a modestly if not
dowdily dressed plain young woman, and on the right, profane love as a
‘flapper’ with bright, low-cut dress revealing her ankles, flourishing a
feather in her left hand. The suitor is shown reflected in the mirror above, a
smart young army officer.
Although
not as enigmatic as his earlier works, Collier remained very topical, achieving
his narrative using dress and composition, rather than facial expression.
The
remaining problem paintings by Collier are an even greater problem in that I
have been unable to find any further details of them, or of the artist’s
intended narratives.
In The
Laboratory (1895), there is clearly a narrative between the old alchemist and a
young woman, who is trying to take an object from the man’s right hand. This
may be a reference to a text narrative which Collier was exploring prior to his
real problem pictures.
The Sinner
(1904) is most probably another problem picture, as it shows a woman, possibly
dressed in widow’s weeds, making an emotionally-charged confession. This begs
much further speculation.
Fire (date
not known) shows a young woman, sat up in bed, afraid by the bright warm light
of a fire, presumably one which is in the same building and putting her into
danger. It is not clear why she is not doing anything to try to escape, though.
The Minx
(date not known) shows a femme fatale holding what might be a mirror in front
of her. Unfortunately the condition of the painting is not good, and its
narrative now more obscured that it was.
Conclusions
This
unusual and short-lived sub-genre exploited the ambiguities that arise in
narrative paintings to elicit debate and speculation. As Fletcher points out,
its themes were the problems of the day, particularly those of women, their
roles, and sexuality. Although other good narrative painters have achieved
similar depth in their works, Collier seems to have been unique in his
development of such problem pictures.
The Story
in Paintings: Problem pictures. By Hoakley. The Eclectic Light Company,
February 19, 2016.
A Fallen Idol
In 1913, John Collier contributed A Fallen Idol to the annual Royal Academy summer exhibition. The painting depicts a young woman crouched in grief or shame at the knee of a slightly older man, who looks up and out into the distance, presenting his impassive face for our inspection. Viewers seized on the picture and its title, offering competing – and often facetious – answers to the question of which of the two was the ‘fallen idol’. The World noted that there was ‘always a little crowd of speculators’ before the picture, and even after nearly three months of exhibition, public interest remained high enough that The Times published Collier's response to ‘a correspondent who asked him to “solve the riddle of his picture”’. When the tabloid paper the Daily Sketch sponsored a competition for the best interpretation of the ‘problem picture’, the editors were inundated with responses ranging from the serious to the satirical. Readers suggested that the woman was ‘a bridge fiend who had become overwhelmed by debt … The unhappy lady was also alleged to have: neglected her dying child; confessed that she was a militant suffragist; ruined her husband's digestion by her bad cooking’. He, in turn, was ‘held to be a gambler, forger, cheat at cards, victim to drugs or drink, and even a Cabinet Minister’. While the majority of respondents believed adultery (usually the woman's) was an issue, even this did not resolve the picture, as viewers debated questions of motivation and likely outcome. Had the husband neglected his young wife? Would he accept his share of responsibility for their marital difficulties, or would the matter end up in divorce court?
This rich
mixture of playful speculation and moral evaluation bears all the hallmarks of
gossip. And, indeed, the best way to describe the reception of A Fallen Idol is
to say that viewers gossiped about the depicted characters as if they were real
people. The Daily Sketch competition was, of course, an attempt to generate
publicity and attract readers, and the rhetorical device of gossip offered a
veneer of respectable distance from lowbrow responses. Yet the very fact of the
paper's reliance on gossip as a publicity device suggests that the possibility
of this kind of reading was a significant part of the painting's appeal. Such
press accounts thus provide tantalising evocations of the picture's ephemeral
social life: exhibited before large crowds at the Academy and widely reported
on in the press. In this article, I suggest that taking gossip seriously as a
mode of engagement with art both amplifies our understanding of the meanings,
functions, and pleasures of narrative painting, and suggests specific
connections between exhibition culture and the meanings of pictures.
Gossip is a
mode of conversation, ‘idle, evaluative talk’ about other people, fuelled by
speculation and often containing a hint of scandal or impropriety. While gossip
is commonly identified with the discussion of people whom one knows, the term
can also be extended to the discussion of people not directly known to the
gossipers, such as celebrities, royals, or – I argue – the invented characters
in narrative paintings. As Reva Wolf and Gavin Butt have argued in their
respective work on Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers, pictures themselves can be
acts of visual gossip, displaying artistic identities, and constituting subgroups
of viewers in the know. Gossip is also, as the case of A Fallen Idol makes
clear, a conversational mode of response generated by viewers, exchanged at
exhibitions, in the press, and – it is perhaps safe to assume, though we have
little direct evidence – in other social settings. As recent scholarship in
anthropology, sociology, and psychology has demonstrated, such gossip serves an
important social function, creating and solidifying individual and group
identities through the mutual investigation of social codes. Recognising both the social function and the
potential subversiveness of gossip, historians have begun to use gossip as a form
of historical archive, suggesting that it may be particularly valuable for
recovering the voices and perspectives of those generally excluded from more
authoritative sources. But gossip is, by its very nature, fugitive: filled with
inside knowledge and jokes, generally communicated in oral conversation, and
only rarely preserved in written form. How, then, might we begin to recover a
history and theory of gossip as a mode of engagement with narrative painting?
Located at
the intersection of the Victorian narrative tradition with the modern mass
media, the problem pictures of the 1910s generated a rich archive of gossipy
reception. Narrative paintings of modern life had been perennial popular
favourites at the mid-Victorian Royal Academy. The problem picture extended
that tradition into the late- nineteenth- and early- twentieth centuries,
transforming the highly detailed moralising paintings of the mid-Victorian era
into ambiguous and often slightly risqué paintings of modern life that invited
multiple, equally plausible interpretations. Viewers and critics responded
enthusiastically, crowding the Academy galleries and filling the pages of
newspapers and magazines with possible explanations. In the early years of the
twentieth century, the term ‘problem picture’ was coined by the press to
describe this phenomenon, a fact that points to the critical role of the
expanding periodical press in creating, sustaining, and extending the conversations
the pictures provoked. Although the popularity of the problem picture peaked in
the first decade of the twentieth century, artists continued to use the form in
the 1910s and beyond in order to engage with topical questions of morality and
politics, including divorce law, anti-Semitism, and drug use. Indeed, while the
problem pictures of the 1910s – with titles like Out of It and Cocaine – were
not granted much aesthetic legitimacy, this very lack of authority allowed for
an even greater level of popular response and speculation, recorded in the
chatty art coverage of the tabloid press, viewers' entries to newspaper
competitions, and occasional letters to artists – in other words, the
discursive traces of historical gossip.
Such
narratives in the press were not, of course, identical to any actual viewers'
vocalised responses, and the available archive is necessarily constructed
within journalistic and critical texts. The press thus does double duty,
constituting, at least in part, the mode of response it names as gossip, and
serving as our primary representation of it. But the consistent deployment of
the rhetorical form of ‘gossip’ as a frame for the representation of problem
pictures and their reception across a wide range of newspapers and journals –
from working-class Sunday papers to Society magazines, from tabloids aimed at
the lower-middle classes to the solidly established dailies – does point us to
the visual and historical particularities of these pictures, which encouraged
such a mode of response. In what follows, I use these pictures and their
reception to establish a taxonomy of gossipy modes of engagement with narrative
painting, and to investigate the specific functions of each mode. The result is
both an examination of a specific set of pictures and a case study that
illuminates some of the complex relations between the social experience of
viewing art, the media reporting of exhibitions, and the meanings of narrative
pictures, at the very moment of their apparent eclipse in the early twentieth
century.
Gossiping
at the Royal Academy
Exhibitions
were, of course, far more than collections of pictures. The physical space of a
gallery, the kinds of pictures exhibited, the hanging of the pictures, and the
composition, density, and motivation of the audience all shaped an exhibition's
culture, the physical and social environment that influenced viewers'
interactions with the art on view and with one another. Narrative painting,
particularly the problem picture, flourished in what we might call the Royal
Academy's culture of conversation, and the contours of that experience are
critical to understanding its reception. While the Academy's audience and
prestige declined over the course of the nineteenth century, it remained a
major social and artistic event well into the twentieth century, as the
extensive coverage of the 1905 opening-day private view attests: ‘From ten
o'clock onwards the great quadrangle … began to fill with carriages, and Watts’
giant equestrian statue of “Physical Energy” was soon besieged with footmen and
horsemen of another kind. The long and crimsoned staircase up to the vestibule
was lined with palms and flowers – lilies, roses, and glowing geraniums'. As
reported in 1907, the crush of visitors continued inside the exhibition: ‘At
four in the afternoon the crowd was so thick that it was only possible to move
round the rooms with the greatest difficulty. In front of many of the pictures,
the artist, surrounded by a knot of friends, was modestly answering questions,
explaining details, or receiving congratulations. Other knots of people discussed
golfing prospects or week-end trips’. Before particularly popular pictures, the
conversation could be deafening, as the Morning Post reported in 1903: ‘The
noise at four o'clock in the Third Gallery, where everyone was talking at once,
was extraordinary’.
Discussion
of the pictures extended beyond the physical space of the Academy and the day
of the private view, continuing in other social settings and in the pages of
the periodical press. The most commonly recognised motive for attending the
Academy was to get ‘conversation’, and reviews of the Academy in daily papers
often focused on this aspect of the exhibition, asking ‘And what about
the … pictures? What is going to be the most eagerly discussed, and what can we
talk about, at dinners, or (if we are dancing men) to girls who are so hard to
talk to about anything but the Academy, when one is “sitting out” with them’. As a critic for Reynolds's Newspaper
explained:
“ The
importance of the Academy is social rather than artistic. It has become a legalised
and highly respectable topic of conversation. We must all carry about with us a
stock of opinions about the works of the artists who paint for this exhibition.
These opinions are as necessary for each gregarious individual as a pocket
handkerchief or a cigarette case. They do to pull out and flourish on awkward
occasions: the aged don't mind them and with the young they often serve as a
prelude to sweeter things.”
While male
viewers were jokingly encouraged to get conversation to fill up awkward moments
or to advance their flirtations, women were instructed to take the social
duties of conversation more seriously. As the ladies' magazine the Queen
advised its readers in 1898, ‘A Royal Academy exhibition, like a new play,
creates conversation. It is a subject on which anyone can dilate at a dinner
party or an afternoon tea’. Popular pictures, it seems, served as topics of
gossip among various kinds of social groups, from friends attending the Academy
together to relative strangers meeting in a range of social situations. The
periodical press both claimed to reproduce such gossip and participated in it,
extending its reach beyond the walls of the exhibition. Located in both serious
art reviews and in more popular coverage of the Academy as a social event, such
reported gossip could both offer the uninitiated reader a view of the
fashionable Academy and serve as a foil to the more elevated appreciation
evinced by the critic himself.
The Railway Station
The
Academy's culture of conversation had important implications for how viewers
approached individual paintings and the kinds of paintings to which they were
drawn. The narrative paintings of modern life that became popular at the
Academy from the 1850s onwards presented the contemporary world in naturalistic
form, inviting viewers to relate to the picture through the lens of their own
experience. Writing about William Powell Frith's modern-life scene The Railway
Station in 1862, Tom Taylor described the parameters of this kind of response:
‘There is nothing here that does not come within the round of common
experience. We all of us are competent to understand these troubles or
pleasures, anxieties or annoyances: There is no passage of these many emotions
but we can more or less conceive of ourselves as passing through’. Such
discussions tended to focus on emotional response and moral evaluation, as
viewers engaged with even the most unlikely painted characters as if they were
real people. In 1907, a report in the Daily Mail on the popularity of Frank
Cadogan Cowper's painting of the devil disguised as a troubadour singing to a
group of nuns offered a vivid example of this kind of reading, extended even
beyond the parameters of what might generally be considered modern-life genre:
“He has
fascinated them,” said one severe lady spectator with eyeglasses.
“And they
think they are converting him,” said a young man by her side.
“I think,”
said an American lady slowly, “that girl who is laughing is real fast.”
And so
throughout the afternoon the comment went on.””
Such readings
of paintings in terms of the depicted individuals' emotions and characters move
aesthetic response into the realm of gossip in intent and function: ‘idle,
evaluative talk’ about other people, exchanged to fill time and build
relationships, and serving to test and demonstrate moral beliefs and values.
If all
narrative painting offered this potential, however, problem pictures
deliberately foregrounded it. Artists used ambiguous narratives and topical
subjects to situate their pictures in the realm of gossip, capturing public
interest through their creative reworkings of contemporary scandal and media
events. In return, viewers and critics generated multiple stories about the
characters in the paintings, inventing motives for their actions, dissecting their
characters, and predicting their futures. As one humorous account of a reading
of A Fallen Idol indicates, such responses could become quite elaborate: ‘The
thing's obvious of course; the woman's done it. Her husband doesn't mind much
either judging by his expression. He's simply trying to remember the address of
his lawyer, and whether that rich American widow who gave him the “glad eye”
over the table the other evening really meant matrimony or – or not’. The tone
of the comment is revealing of the differences between these pictures and
earlier Victorian moralising narrative paintings. At a time of rapidly changing
aesthetic standards, when many critics were urging attention to the formal and
material qualities of the art work rather than its subject matter, at least
some artists, critics, and viewers at the early-twentieth-century Academy were
willing to treat narrative paintings of modern life as open-ended games rather
than didactic lessons, while the expanding tabloid press opened the door to extended
coverage of such playful interpretations. Eliciting readings such as this one,
problem pictures became the quintessential example of narrative painting as
visual gossip.
A survey of
these late problem pictures and their reception suggests three major modes of
engagement with gossip: topicality, intertextuality, and identification. Each
of these three modes has roots in earlier narrative painting, making it
possible to map the continuities and differences between the problem picture
and its Victorian forerunners in ways that are suggestive of a longer history
of gossip as a mode of engagement with narrative painting. Problem pictures
pushed the boundaries of modern-life genre, featuring incidents of suicide,
scandal, and crime inspired by the lurid stories of tabloid journalism. The
pictures thus became acts of gossip in themselves and elicited gossip about
individuals – real and fictional – in return. As part of their speculation
about invented characters, viewers also engaged in intertextual readings linking
different pictures, and making identifications between the depicted characters
and real individuals. In each case, gossip functioned as a linking mechanism,
forging connections between viewers, between pictures, and between public and
private interpretations of the world.
Topicality:
Gossip and the Discourses of Morality
Three
problem pictures were exhibited at the Academy in 1913 and each relied upon a
topical appeal, drawing on contemporary events in the news. Collier's painting
A Fallen Idol received the most coverage, both because the artist had pioneered
the form in the previous decade, and because the exhibition of the picture
coincided with a renewed attention to the question of divorce law. The
much-publicised release of the report of the Royal Commission on Divorce and
Matrimonial Causes in December of 1912 highlighted the question, among others,
of whether or not men and women should be equally and legally culpable for
adulterous conduct. Janice Harris has argued that the hearings of the Royal
Commission opened up a cultural space in which to challenge the stock Edwardian
story of divorce, in which the adulterous woman destroyed the marriage and was
justly punished, and the picture seems to have provided a similar opportunity. While
responses to the picture rarely mentioned divorce directly, the question of
adultery and its effects were central to the picture's reception. The solidly
middle-class newspapers The Times and the Daily Telegraph concurred that ‘the
puzzle is this time no puzzle at all’, assigning guilt to the young wife and
assimilating the picture to the tradition of ‘fallen woman’ paintings. In contrast to the inexorable narrative of sin
and suicide that characterised the mid-Victorian fallen woman tale, however,
the possibility of reintegration into the family and respectable society is
suggested in these accounts, and The Times even proposed that the painting
‘might also be called, “Will he forgive her?”’ The woman's magazine the Queen,
in contrast, read the question of guilt as genuinely open-ended, asking ‘Who is
the fallen idol, the woman who crouches with bowed head by the man's knee, or
the man who looks sadly towards us above her stooping form?’, perhaps
suggesting a breakdown along gender lines in readings of the picture.
Tabloid
papers aimed at lower-middle-class readers were the place where the picture's
ambiguity was most fully explored in terms of gender and class. This was, in
part, because the format of such papers – focused on human interest news
snippets and readers' letters – was perfectly poised to exploit the playfully
risqué gossip that the picture could generate. In an article announcing the
competition for the ‘most convincing explanation’ of the picture, the Daily
Sketch compiled a list of responses, with female respondents including ‘Lady
Bland Sutton’ and ‘a tea shop waitress’ agreeing on the woman's guilt, while ‘a
City policeman’ observed, ‘Looks as if the gentleman had been owning up a bit,
and his wife's fair upset to find he ain't a hero after all’. In a later report
on the results of the contest, the responses were categorised by verdict,
shifting the focus to the probable nature of male and female weakness.
Responses were equally divided between identifying the man and the woman as the
sinner, but as the editors pointed out, ‘it is interesting to note that while
the woman's fall was in most cases attributed to passion the man's fault was
almost invariably of another order’, generally financial one. Perhaps the
strongest subtext of the article, however, is its emphasis on the inclusiveness
of the phenomenon. The results were introduced with the comment that ‘Fantasies
based on the picture came in from readers of all sorts and conditions. The
effort of a countess was followed by one from a pavement artist’, reassuring
the lower-middle-class readers of the Daily Sketch that their interest in the
pictures was shared by the highest reaches of society. In contrast, the Society
magazine the World distanced its readers from the ‘average man or woman’ to
whom such pictures appealed, and prophesied that ‘when the Academy supplements
reach our Colonies and Dependencies Mr. Collier will receive again many letters
from farthest India and Africa asking the nature of the crime of the lady’,
locating such viewers as far as possible from its fashionable readers.
In the face
of such speculation, Collier was eventually moved to intervene in the public
discussion. In a newspaper statement about the painting, he identified the wife
as the guilty party, but opened the door to conjecture about the causes and
effects of the transgression: ‘It is a young wife confessing to her middle-aged
husband. The husband is evidently a studious man, and has possibly neglected
her. At any rate, the first thought that occurs to him is, “Was it my fault?” I
imagine he will forgive his wife’. Collier's later comments on the picture
suggest that the painting was a quite deliberate intervention in the debate
over divorce law on the side of more sympathy for women: ‘To judge from the
correspondence I received, a good many people were interested in the question
whether the husband should or would forgive his wife. I think most of my
correspondents hoped that he would. Of this result of my picture I felt
distinctly proud’.
Out of It
If A Fallen
Idol engaged current social debates in a fairly substantive fashion, other problem
pictures at the Academy in 1913 were more closely linked to tabloid narratives
of melodrama and political scandal. Depicting a young woman in evening dress
lying unconscious or dead beneath some bushes, Out of It by Alfred Priest resonated
with two contemporary tragedies: the shooting and death of the Countess of
Cottenham while hunting, and the murder of a young domestic servant, Winnie
Mitchell, whose body was found buried in the woods. The artist himself located
this picture within the context of these two recent events, and justified its
sensational aspect with the claim that ‘life itself gives us these subjects’.
He went on to say that his subject was drawn from a similar source: ‘My picture
was inspired by a newspaper report five or six years ago. A beautiful girl is
supposed to leave the card-table after a dinner-party. She goes out, just as
she is, in her evening gown, without a cloak or hat. A search party is
organised, but the body is discovered, so the report says, by a village urchin's
dog’. Priest's eagerness to locate the picture's origin in a newspaper report
suggests that the interest of the picture lay in the conversations it could
generate about contemporary events and people in the news. Both of the recent
deaths had generated substantial news coverage, and each was connected with a
whiff of scandal: The death of the Countess – who had divorced her first
husband, with the Count named as co-respondent – was surrounded by the innuendo
of suicide, or worse; while the death of the young servant girl implicated a
married man and was compared to a Hardy novel. In each case, there is the muted
suggestion that the woman's past has somehow caught up with her, an implication
of retribution that provides the animating element of moral judgment to
readers' and viewers' speculations.
Finance
A third
painting exhibited at the Academy in 1913 extended the problem picture's
topical reach into the masculine realm of politics and public life. Depicting a
‘group of Jewish financiers’ and ‘a fair-faced gentile’ facing one another
across the aftermath of a luxurious dinner, Edgar Bundy's Finance enjoyed a
popularity that was largely attributed to its ‘topical interest’. To many
viewers, the picture seemed to refer to the on-going Marconi affair, a
political and financial scandal in which the Jewish Isaacs family was accused
of nepotism and three cabinet ministers were accused of illegal stock
speculation. A cartoon by E.T. Reed published in the Daily Sketch made the
connection directly, casting Winston Churchill as the affronted gentile with
the three accused ministers and three heavily caricatured Jewish businessmen
confronting him across the table. As the cartoon's caricatured rendering of the
Jewish men suggests, discussion of the scandal was fuelled by stereotypes of
greedy Jewish financiers and fears of an international Jewish cabal whose
influence on finance and politics exceeded any national government. Reviews of
the picture accordingly focused on its depiction of Jewish character and power.
In the mainstream press, many critics seem simply to have assumed the
transparency of the characterisation of the Jewish men; the Daily Mail critic
described the scene and commented: ‘The crude display of wealth and the
strained, keen expression on the faces of the Jews all turned on the young man
are wonderfully realistic’. Martin Hardie, writing in the Queen, noted some
heavy-handedness in the representation, but defended it as ultimately true both
to life and artistic intention: ‘Mr. Bundy has chosen unpleasant Semite types
because it suited his purpose; but they are types, none the less, and not
caricatures’. Such responses, however, did not go uncontested. Writing in the
Daily Telegraph, Claude Phillips – whose mother had been raised an Orthodox Jew
– noted that ‘for these life-size figures of opulent financiers … the most
repulsive types have been deliberately chosen and as deliberately exaggerated’,
and called the painting ‘a passionate assertion in paint of anti-semitism’.As
viewers identified the represented figures with real political actors, their
discussion of ‘race’, character and motive became a vehicle both for the evaluation
of specific politicians and entrepreneurs, and for the confirmation or
refutation of racial stereotypes and prejudices.
The strongest reaction against the painting came in a periodical aimed at Jewish readers. In a lengthy response to the painting entitled ‘A Disgraceful Picture’, the editors of the Jewish Chronicle reviewed the debate and charged the Academy with ‘moral retrogression’ for exhibiting the picture, accusing the institution of trafficking in journalistic public pandering and offering offence to Jewish viewers and artists. But it is the Academy's location as a place for the formation and exchange of social attitudes that is the cause of the most serious transgression: ‘The picture is blatant in its anti-Semitism and one has only to listen for a few minutes to the remarks of visitors to the Exhibition who stand in front of this picture to realise how unwise the Council of the Academy were in permitting this cartoon to find a place on their walls’. As viewers are drawn to the picture by the contemporary scandal and use it as an occasion to gossip and air their opinions, their beliefs are being shaped and directed by what the editors of the Jewish Chronicle see as the anti-Semitic perspective of the image.
Problem
pictures faded from the walls of the Academy during the years of World War I,
but reappeared in 1919 with a subject unimaginable at the pre-War
Academy. Cocaine by Alfred Priest) reverses the composition of A Fallen Idol,
with the man's head in the woman's lap, as she looks out and meets our gaze
with a troubled stare. But the circumstances are a world away from Collier's
respectable middle-class couple in distress. The woman sits in her dressing
gown, in a luxurious modern room in the early hours of the morning (the clock
on the side table reads 4.50). A young man in evening dress is slumped in her
lap, unconscious, returned home after a long night out on the town. The title
signals his presumed vice: cocaine. The drug was much in the news in the spring
of 1919. While it had long been available by prescription, it was only during
World War I that cocaine became identified with a drug underground and a
subject of public concern. The overdose death of the young actress Billie
Carleton in November 1918 and the inquest and trial that followed focused
attention on the dangers of modern drug use, and created a public understanding
of cocaine as ‘a moral menace’, particularly for vulnerable young modern women.
Contemporary responses situate the picture within this context, introducing its
topic by noting, ‘poor Billie Carleton can't be left alone’.
But, of
course, the picture does not follow the news account, as it is the man who is
the ‘dope fiend’ here. As Priest explained in an interview with the Daily
Mirror, the picture is based on a true story of a young wife who ‘discovered
suddenly that her idol had feet of clay’. Like Collier, Priest aimed to arouse
viewers' sympathy as well as their condemnation: ‘And you will observe that in
the picture her hand protects and sustains as it falls across the shoulders of
the crushed thing that is her husband’. While the gender roles have changed,
the dynamics of fallenness and forgiveness are the same as in Collier's Fallen
Idol, challenging viewers' stock stories and inviting them to write new ones.
As these
examples make clear, topicality and a symbiotic relationship with the press was
central to how the problem pictures of the 1910s worked. The motives of
individual painters of problem pictures varied, from Priest's self-conscious
attention-seeking to Collier's interest in serious social and political questions.
But they all shared the desire to use the pictures to spark discussion,
allowing viewers to engage with contemporary ‘moral panics’ and media scandals,
ranging from the most intimate matters of marital life to the motivations and
weaknesses of politicians and public figures. Artists drew on popular news
stories and scandals to engage viewers in their pictures and the press
publicised – and ‘problematised’ – the resulting pictures. The press was thus a
critical component in the circuit of meaning and interpretation, providing the
raw material for the pictures and then reporting on (and thus helping to create
and sustain) the conversations they generated.
This
multi-layered relationship with the press is one key difference between these
problem pictures and earlier examples of topicality in Victorian art. While
major current events such as the Crimean War and the ‘Indian Mutiny’ sparked
spates of paintings in the mid-Victorian era, they tended to use individual
incident and anecdote primarily to convey a larger theme – such as patriotic
sentiment – rather than to explore or dramatise the nuances of an individual's
life or psychology. William Powell Frith's modern-life panoramas and his
narrative series such as The Race for Wealth (1880), which rely upon viewers'
knowledge of contemporary events for their legibility and evoke multivalent
conversations, are closer in function, but still provide a legible and
(over)determined arc from sin through deserved punishment, and thus provide a
kind of moral and narrative horizon beyond which interpretation cannot easily
extend. The possibilities for reception
differed as well, of course, as the gossip and scandal driven human-interest
coverage of the New Journalism did not yet exist as either source or publicity
outlet for these modern-life pictures.
In
contrast, the problem pictures of the 1910s fused the tradition of modern-life
genre painting with new modes of journalistic sensation. Like the stories of
murder, sex, and accident that filled the pages of the mass circulation press,
problem pictures dramatised the everyday life of ‘ordinary’ people. The
pictures' theatrically posed moments of suspense left the details of the
characters' past, present, and future to viewers' imaginations, fuelled by the
habits of gossip and scandal fostered by the tabloid press. The elusive key to
each picture seems to turn on the psychology and motivation of the actors
represented: Was the wife's infidelity justified, and will it be forgiven? Are
the Jewish dinner guests shrewd businessmen or corrupt conspirators? How did
this promising young man fall prey to a drug habit? As an article in Truth
noted in 1878, such questions are the very source of gossip's popularity: While
discussion of the facts of a case is necessarily limited in scope, conjecture
about people's motives offered endless possibilities. This kind of gossipy
speculation plays a critical role in the formation and performance of moral
values and social norms. As contemporary psychologists John Sabini and Maury
Silver have argued, gossip ‘involves taking a stance about another's behavior –
behavior which could be our own, but isn't. To do that is to dramatize
ourselves: our attitudes, values, tastes, temptations, inclination, will, and
so forth’. At a time when gender roles were under pressure from feminist
challenges to Victorian ideals and the growth of the middle class was creating
fractures between its upper and lower reaches, class and gender were the
primary axes along which interpretations of these pictures were generated,
labelled and disseminated. As viewers indulged in the seemingly frivolous
pleasures of gossip before these pictures, they were staking claims to their
own identities and values, testing their moral codes against the problems of
modern life and the values of their peers.
Simultaneously,
this kind of gossip functioned as a link between the public and the private
worlds, as political scandals and legal questions of divorce or drug use were
understood and debated through the discussion of these invented characters'
lives, psychologies, and motives. As Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued in her
study of gossip and literature, gossip's power derives from its ‘liminal
position between public and private … Gossip interprets public facts in private
terms: The senator will not run for re-election because his wife will abandon
him if he does. It also gives private detail general meaning: The young woman's
drinking problem exemplifies the strain on women trying to do everything at
once’. Drawing upon public narratives of
law, celebrity, and scandal and using the techniques of narrative painting to
evoke relational responses from their viewers, these topical problem pictures
fused the public and the private through the medium of gossip.
Intertexuality
and Identification: Gossip and Social Networks
While
subject matter was perhaps the most obvious way in which artists engaged their
audiences, the gossipy appeal of problem pictures was not limited to
contemporary news events. As viewers focused on the characters in these
paintings, they made other kinds of links and connections between the
represented figures. A seemingly mundane ‘human interest’ story from 1913
suggests some of the ways viewers could relate to the painted figures. On 6 May
1913, the day after it ran a feature on A Fallen Idol, the Daily Sketch
featured Alfred Priest's Out of It on its front page. The story focuses on the
fact that the pictures share the same model – one Miss May Fagerstein, who is
pictured below the painting. While the article does not pursue them, there are
at least two potential modes of using this connection to extend the discussion
the picture aroused. On the one hand, viewers might follow the model through
the stories of the different pictures, interpreting them as episodes in the
life of a single character. On the other, the news story suggests the
possibility of seeing ‘through’ the pictures to the real personalities involved
in creating them. Both of these options – what I call intertextuality and
identification – expanded the potential for treating the characters in the
paintings as subjects of gossip and creating social networks of artists and
viewers.
Out of It
While the suggestion was not taken up in the accompanying article, the use of the same model opened up the possibility of reading the pictures in tandem, and attributing the young woman's death in Out of It to the crisis depicted in A Fallen Idol. This mode of intertextual reading was common in earlier problem pictures, as viewers turned the models into characters whose histories could be followed by attentive viewers. One reviewer recognised the unhappy husband of A Fallen Idol as a character in Collier's problem picture of 1908, The Sentence of Death, a scene of a young man in a doctor's office: ‘Perhaps the clue may lie in the fact that the young gentleman who supports the weeping woman is the same youth whose case was given up as hopeless by the doctor two years ago’. This identification, of course, opens up an entirely new area for speculation as to the couple's situation. The accused woman in Collier's problem picture The Cheat of 1905 was identified as appearing in several other contemporary pictures, including his problem picture of 1906, ‘Indeed, indeed, repentance oft I swore!’ The Daily Mirror saw the narrative connection as an obvious one: ‘Now we know that the cheat was the woman standing up. This year she is gazing into the fire, wishing she hadn't cheated’. Reading the pictures as successive incidents added a stronger moral element, illustrating a narrative arc from crime to remorse, if not punishment. This kind of intertextual reading both extended viewers' understanding of the depicted personalities as characters with histories and psychologies, and created a community of viewers who followed the stories year after year.
The Cheat
A variant on this kind of intertextual reading put the characters into conversation with the individuals depicted in the portraits that filled the walls of the average Academy. A long notice in Truth in 1906 made much of who precisely was the recipient of the whispered confession of Collier's penitent, whose ‘opulent physical charms’ offered ample evidence of the direction her ‘faults … must have probably tended’. The hanging suggested one scenario, in which ‘The elaborately “frocked” lady … is supposed to be exclaiming, just loud enough for “The Hon Mr and Mrs Douglas Carnegie with their sons John and David” to hear her in their full-size motor-car, “Indeed, indeed, repentance oft I swore!”’ But the reviewer was entranced by another possibility, complimenting the hanging committee for ‘having successfully resisted the temptation of moving [the picture] from Gallery VII to Gallery V … For then Mr Collier's grande dame would have been positively sighing out her vain expostulations in close proximity to the characteristic portrait of the Rt. Hon. Sir John Gorell Barnes, LL.D., President of the Divorce Division of the High Court of Justice’.
The tight hanging of the Academy exhibition encouraged viewers in such readings of pictures in relation to one another. Mark Hallett has traced this mode of response to the earliest Academy exhibitions of the late eighteenth century, arguing that the new exhibition format of the Academy ‘fostered an equivalently novel form of interpretation in which paintings were defined as objects interacting with those hanging nearby’. In his discussion of this ‘dialogic’ mode of reading pictures, Hallett focuses on the meta-narratives of artistic, social, and political power that the Academy hangings created, but, of course, such an approach also allowed for more individual readings, as viewers made their own connections and comparisons. As demonstrated in the example cited above, such readings made the Academy exhibition an imagined social space where the characters in narrative paintings could interact with the prominent society figures represented in the exhibited portraits. Was there a hint of scandal when the Truth critic imagined the penitent confessing to the Carnegies? A suggestion of titillation when the Honourable Judge's serious portrait was juxtaposed with the ‘opulent physical charms’ of one of his ‘cases’? Such juxtapositions could also be used as a kind of critique of the élite whose portraits dominated the Academy. In his review of Tom Mostyn's picture of a doss house, A.C.R. Carter drew attention to the social impossibility of the intrusion of its subjects into the more rarefied space of the Academy: ‘As Bridge is now more fashionable than slumming, the Hanging Committee has apparently shied at waking the consciences of its patrons, and has hung this powerful study of despair and callousness high above the head of the “Countess of Warwick!”’ [by Sargent]. For some critics, this interaction between the pictures was precisely the problem with the Academy: as a critic in the Art Journal complained at the early date of 1856:
“ In going
around the rooms, the mind is called upon to be always jumping from great to
little, and from grave to gay, and back again, and has to go through a series
of sudden convulsions and transitions, in seeking to do justice to the labours
of each artist. For my part, my powers are not facile enough to prance with
ease from broad farce to pathos, or from pet lap-dogs … to a great historic or
poetic effort; or … the ruins of Carthage, … to the broad business city face of
Mr. ——, with his well-brushed whiskers.”
His respondent,
however, pointed out that he was speaking as a ‘lover of Art’, while the
Academy was aimed at a wider audience, who ‘go to see the portraits of their
friends, or wile away an hour or two, or to say that they have been there, and
to be amused, but not to think closely of or study the works; and the variety
of images and characters in the very quick succession to which you object is
part of the amusement and excitement to them’. As many scholars have noted, the
change from this kind of crowded hanging to the modern convention of a single
row of widely-spaced pictures worked to highlight the formal qualities and
autonomy of each individual image, but it also changed the social experience of
the exhibition by diminishing the potential narrative contact between images. Modern
hanging practices create a different physical relationship between the pictures
and the viewers, and encourage a different pattern of movement and attention.
Rather than standing in a conversational group and looking at a wall filled
with pictures – a mode of viewing represented in countless illustrations of the
Academy – the single row of widely spaced pictures encourages viewers to walk
from one picture to the next, pausing before each individual work in turn, in a
measured rhythm of diversion punctuated by attention, either individual or
communal.
A second
possibility opened up by the identification of Miss May Fagerstein as the model
for both A Fallen Idol and Out of It was the link it made to the real people
behind the pictures, whether professional models or identifiable public
figures. Shared models were a way of linking artists and their aims in the
public imagination. Defining the problem pictures of the year had become a kind
of contest between different critics and papers by the 1910s, and one effect of
the Daily Sketch cover was to define Out of It as a problem picture by virtue
of its shared model with A Fallen Idol, painted by the ‘Great Problem-Artist’
John Collier. Recognisable portraits of the artist's friends or public figures
opened up even more scope for discussion. Collier's friend Reginald Barratt was
recognised by critics both in the role of the doctor in The Sentence of Death
and as the ‘cheat's’ partner. Critics played upon their recognition in various
ways: While one critic for the Morning Post in 1905 explicitly identified the
sitter and his connections to Collier – describing the figure in The Cheat as
‘an excellent portrait of Mr. Collier's fellow artist and near neighbour, Mr.
Reginald Barratt, A.R.W.S’. – others were more circumspect. In 1908, the critic for the Art Journal simply
hinted that the ‘doctor is at once recognisable as a prominent associate of the
old Water-Colour Society, who has several times played parts in Mr. Collier's
pictorial dramas’, while an article in the Morning Post used the crowd's
ignorance as a foil to the critic's (and, presumably, the reader's)
penetration: ‘The artist who sat to Mr Collier for the physician in his picture
was in the Sixth Gallery during the afternoon, but was unrecognized by the
crowd despite the singular fidelity of his likeness’. Recognition of the sitter
located the viewer ‘in the know’, conversant with artistic circles and
friendships and elevated above the unfashionable ‘shilling public’.
Artists had
embedded portraits – of celebrities or friends – in narrative paintings
throughout the Victorian period. Two of the most popular painters of
modern-life genre – John Everett Millais and William Powell Frith – regularly
included friends and public figures in their paintings, and artists such as
Edwin Landseer, Daniel Maclise, Anna Mary Howitt, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema did
so on occasion as well. While at least
some viewers must have recognised such references, there are few traces of such
recognition in published reception. One exception comes from the American
press. An article in the New York Times identified Kate Dickens, the novelist's
daughter, as the female figure in Millais's Black Brunswicker (1860), and used
the occasion to note ‘she is engaged to be married to CHARLES COLLINS (the
“Eye-witness” of All the Year Round,) brother of WILKIE COLLINS, and a great friend
of MILLAIS'S’. Though not made explicit,
the subject of the gossip is appropriate to the picture's subject, young lovers
embracing. An article in the Saturday Review entitled ‘Newspaper Gossip’
rebuked the American papers for ‘print[ing] what in English towns is only said
or whispered’, but went on to repeat the identification of Kate Dickens and the
news of her engagement as an example of the misguided American practice. Other
identifications played on contemporary scandal, such as Landseer's The Taming
of the Shrew (The Pretty Horsebreaker), exhibited at the Academy in 1861. The
model for the ‘pretty horsebreaker’ was recognised as a famous horsewoman, but
the precise identification varied. Reviews of the Academy identified her as the
respectable Miss Annie Gilbert, but at least one group of viewers read the
figure of the luxuriously reclining woman as the courtesan Catherine Walters, also
known as ‘Skittles’. As viewers recognised (or mis-recognised) portraits within
narrative paintings, the scope of gossip reached beyond pure fiction, blending
real actors with invented scenarios.
The social
significance of this kind of response is demonstrated by a fictional character
invoked by the critic W.W. Fenn, writing in Belgravia: one ‘Jack Knowington’.
Presented as the narrator's fictional companion at the Academy, ‘Jack
Knowington’ identifies the older man in Millais's painting The North-west
Passage (1874) as ‘Lord Byron's friend Captain Trelawney’ and uses the
identification as a starting point for a long gossipy digression:
“It's rather curious … now that cremation is
being discussed, to find ourselves face to face with the presentment of one who
actually assisted as high priest at such a ceremony; for you know it was
Trelawney who brought home Shelley's heart … There's another funny thing, too,
about the picture: it seems he had a great objection to sitting … but a lady
interceded … and an odd bargain was struck. … The lady complained of a headache
and looked ill. “Take a Turkish bath,” said Trelawney, “and I'll sit to
Millais.”
Knowington is a figure of mockery, as he uses the picture to demonstrate his social standing and inside knowledge. But he also allows the critic to ventriloquise the information, and the article's very title – ‘Echoes from the Royal Academy, By a Listener’– suggests the importance of hearing (rather than seeing) at the exhibition.
Conclusion
One final
example pushes the historical archive to its furthest reaches, presenting an
intriguing view of the more personal identifications modern-life narrative
paintings could trigger. In March of 1915, a woman wrote a pair of letters to
John Collier, in which she connects the genre of the problem picture to her
most intimate personal experience. Her first letter begins ‘For weeks I have
thought of a picture. I wish you would paint it. … I would call the picture “A
sleep he got of me,” based partly upon the poem “Wedding Morn” by D.H. Lawrence
and upon an actual experience’. In a second letter (after an apparently
sympathetic response from Collier), she emphasised the personal nature of the
story: ‘Shall you mind if I again tell you that it is an actual experience of
my own? And I read Lawrence's poem afterwards. You understand?’ D.H. Lawrence's
poem is the meditation of a woman on her wedding morning, anticipating the next
day's dawn after the consummation of her marriage, so it is not surprising that
the writer goes on to say that it is difficult to speak of the experience, as
it is ‘intimate in the extreme’. If he is interested in painting the picture,
he should read the poem and then, she promises, ‘I will do my very best to fill
in afterwards. It's a very human [illegible] in all its intensity. An everyday
happening, but peculiarly vivid at the present-hour. My lover is a soldier.
Would you consider the khaki setting too topical, too banal?’ While this was
clearly an unusual letter, it suggests a dynamic of personal identification in
response to Collier's problem pictures, hinting at a powerful if largely
unrecoverable potential impact of modern-life genre. For this viewer, at least,
the narrative impulse is a two-way street. She does not simply read narrative
painting in light of personal experience and real social life; narrative
painting and its conventions become a lens through which to interpret her own
life experience, and – she anticipates – to put her own personal experience
into a public frame.
I end with
this example to call attention both to the range and depth of these more
personal readings of narrative paintings, and the limitations of the archive in
allowing us to recover them. Readings of narrative pictures in terms of gossip
– responding to and discussing their characters and their situations as if they
were real people – reached from the most personal experience to the political
intrigue of financial scandals, but only traces of such responses are left to
us today. If not entirely recoverable, however, such meanings were nonetheless
a constitutive part of the experience of narrative painting for Victorian and
later viewers. As anyone who has ever visited a ‘blockbuster’ museum or gallery
exhibition knows, looking at art is a social and performative experience in
most forms of modern exhibition culture. Narrative painting embraces this fact,
and much of its meaning is created in those encounters, allowing for the
performance of individual identity, the creation of social and artistic groups
and subgroups, and connecting personal and public understandings of the world.
Gossip, then, is not only a mode of responding to narrative painting, but a model for how modern-life narrative painting functions. Spacks similarly argues that gossip is a useful analogy for the realist novel, which mediates between public and private life, and sets up a dialogic relationship with the reader. In these narrative paintings, however, the dialogue takes place not only in a private exchange between the image and its viewer, but also in a public exchange between viewers. Identifying gossip as a model for the experience of looking at modern-life narrative painting thus links the physical and social spaces of exhibitions with the meanings of the pictures themselves. As Andrew Hemingway eloquently notes in his analysis of the social experience of the early-nineteenth-century Academy, ‘the art of the past was also a particular type of experience – a function of social relations then prevailing, an effect of discourse, and a range of complex learnt pleasures’. Academies and galleries are not just stages for social actors with the pictures standing in as props, nor are they mute backdrops for aesthetic experiences. The social experiences of exhibitions are a constitutive part of looking at pictures, or, to shift the emphasis, pictures are a constitutive and relational part of the social experience of a visit to an exhibition.
The
reordering of priorities implicit in that last formulation runs contrary, of
course, to the focus of much art-historical writing. But I think it does
suggest something important about the popularity – in the Victorian period and
beyond – of narrative painting and its relation to modern exhibition culture.
Modern-life genre painting creates a shared set of referents – invented
characters and situations – for viewers to gossip about. Gossip most commonly
concerns people known to both gossipers, and serves as social glue, allowing
the gossipers to affirm their membership in a group and to reinforce its shared
values. But as Max Gluckman recognised long ago, gossip about celebrities or
royals can serve the same purpose in the larger, more anonymous social contexts
of modern life: ‘In the great conurbations the discussion of, for example,
stars of film, and sport, produces a basis on which people transitorily
associated can find something personal to talk about’. The fictional characters
in narrative painting provided common ground for the large diverse Academy
audiences, offering a real but morally neutral way to engage in gossip and its
creation of a sense of shared experience and group identity.
Narrative
Painting and Visual Gossip at the Early-Twentieth-Century Royal Academy. By
Pamela Fletcher. Oxford Art Journal. June 1, 2009.
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