Recent Acquisition - Lonely Infinite Distance

The annual Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society exhibition in the cathedral was a few weeks ago now. Long enough, you might think, to assess my latest purchase.

I needed no time at all to like it a lot on the Sunday. I was only glad it was still inexplicably not sold when I went back on Bank Holiday Monday to buy it. When I say 'assess', I mean 'wonder what it's about'. It is ostensibly a smear of yellow in the top left corner of some dark blue.

It is Lonely Infinite Distance by Anthony Mayle, Acrylic, 29 x 29 cm. I don't know if it benefits from its title or if we are being nudged towards a meaning that we might find for ourselves, among however many others, but perhaps it helps.

Three weeks on, I'm more inclined towards a midnight winter moon than any time before sunrise when surely the sky would be a paler blue. The light is coming from behind what might be a ruined building, tentatively suggested but possibly cloud, too. But one attempts any definitive interpretation at one's peril, as one does with Hamlet, late Beethoven or Shostakovich, or Vermeer until Andrew Graham-Dixon recently spoiled all that by apparently explaining it all away.

The Moon doesn't cast yellow light and the foreground wouldn't be that shade of blue, if it ever is and so we are not invited to take it literally. 

There is immense subtlety in it that is entirely ruined by electric light, photography or even being looked at from any distance. There are tiny specks of white to be found in it alongside the detail of the brushwork and minute changes of shading when looked at up close. The colours can be enjoyed for themselves in a palette that at first might appear limited but infer the infinite in its fine nuances of shade. The distance to the source of its light is caught by the perspective that puts it well beyond that which it may or may not be emerging from behind. The loneliness might come from that sense of distance. I simply don't know if it would be better off without its evocative title.

I've been entirely happy with my two purchases from previous such exhibitions but this was the least expensive, never mind inflation, and while being the smallest, I'm not sure that paintings are priced up by measurement like Tony Hancock seems to think in The Rebel. But this is surely better, not for any potential mystical quality but for being less figurative, but not abstract either. Mainly, though, because it is gorgeous to look at and, like the music that is best to listen to and the literature that is best to read, it doesn't have to mean anything that could be set out in an essay.   

Vermeer

No list should ever be regarded as the final answer. A Top 6 compiled today could easily be different by tomorrow and certainly unlikely to be the same in a few years' time. Nominating the Best Books in the House a while back, I should have included Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer ahead of Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World. That doesn't mean Moser is taken off the short list but it does mean that Graham-Dixon is closer to being the actual best book in the house. And thus, for me, the Best Book Ever because if I knew of better ones, they would be in the house.

Such books need to be re-read at least once. While there are a lot of books in the world, and a lot of music and paintings, I prefer to stay with known masterpieces than explore unchartered territory in the hope of finding anything else as good because I suspect the odds are against it. Eventually one feels as if one is approaching the limits of the world one is happy to inhabit. Which is not to say that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a biography of Wittgenstein aren't lined up for the Autumn.

But Vermeer is nothing short of sensational in constructing not only a life but a comprehensive revelation of what those paintings mean where previously he was thought to be a 'sphinx' whose meanings were undecipherable beneath the quiet, the gorgeous treatment of light and something transcending the ordinary. It belongs right up alongside A.N. Wilson's Jesus and Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare as a brilliant account of a life re-interpreted against some generally accepted versions except Vermeer comes across as much the preferable human being.

All the background detail of the warring history of the Netherlands is relevant where other such books sometimes pile it in to make something book length. The diligent research into contemporary records provides Vermeer with a much more coherent and credible life than Jesus Christ or Shakespeare have ever been provide with. Andrew Graham-Dixon concedes that he is often working with suppositions but I find little reason to doubt his whereas those made by biographers of Jesus and Shakespeare usually come with agendas, and much more dubious guesswork.

After the ongoing wars, mainly with Spain, that marked Vermeer's early years, a peace was arrived at. The famous View of Delft, previously thought to be a town glistening gently after some rain, is thus a celebration of ordinary, peaceful life.

The paintings were often done in pairs but their subsequent separation to galleries across the world helped to disguise the fact. Many of the best paintings of women alone in domestic settings were done for one patron and their themes are subtly religious - liberal, 'free-thinking', non-Calvinist religion - very slowly so that the artist was ever in debt to his patron, his mother-in-law who held contrary religious views and others. But the climax of Graham-Dixon's account is his explanation of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. It represents the moment that Mary Magdalene turned round and recognized the resurrected Jesus which thus puts the viewer in his place.

It could be the best book I've ever read, for several different reasons but that's the main one.

PHAS Art Exhibition

 I'm glad I remembered to check up in time when the annual exhibition by the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society was. It was today, taking up the nave of Portsmouth Cathedral, and for the rest of the week.

Of course, as in a poetry magazine, there is plenty of work that is 'not one's kind of thing'. Most things aren't. But one reads, or attends, because there is likely to be something worth knowing about that one wouldn't have otherwise.

My first walk round made the work of Ric Robinson appear the stand outs. Three similar compositions to The Earth Dies Screaming , featured here.

That's a bit dramatic whereas another taking its title from another old pop record, Cruel Summer, might have been more muted until one realizes one doesn't want to be reminded of our 'new normal', parched summers. My favourite of what may or may not have been intended as a triptych was the other one, mostly in a blue that was nearly black and shades of black, something about not knowing about entering into the abyss. Not, as far as I know, taking its title from a piece of music but it might.

These were on sale for £600 and change. I take some convincing, especially when there was a much smaller item, something about eternal light disappearing, that was more affordable. I will have to go back and have another look.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was obvious who was Louise Griffiths-Kimber whose Preseli Hills was easily the most engaging canvas two years ago. She was kind enough to show me around her exhibits which included the Lord Mayor's Prize winner. Proper art people know their stuff. One of her pictures was of Whitby Abbey. I somehow had a feeling her favourite band would be The Cure.

 

You might go in search of art but, time and again, you return with pop music.
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Do I want this painting, for the price I think was being asked- title not properly remembered, the name of the artist so easily forgotten- I think I probably do. Partly for the colours but also for the way it's not quite abstract but only vaguely figurative. And it is gorgeously small and intelligent like the wonderful dog that was on the no. 21 bus on the way home. I'm not in a position to look after a dog but I can just about find space for one more painting.

 

Shadowy Lives

 It says at the top here, and has done for some time that,

The website is now what it has become, ... It will be about whatever suggests itself. 

I quite the way that from time to time a theme develops, rather than the mere repetition of old opinions and prejudices that have been set out several times before.

Coming to the end of Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare, it is every bit as impressive as Jesus by A.N. Wilson and is doing a similar thing. Both are shedding highly informed and rational light on lives that have got out of hand in traditional re-tellings and idolatry. Germaine Greer was one who, in her life of Anne Hathaway, scorned the 'bardolaters' for who Shakespeare could do no wrong but even their devotion is paltry and half-hearted compared to that of Christians and their versions of Jesus. Wilson knows the scriptures and reads them with an alert scepticism and Duncan-Jones brings the same intelligence to her interpretation of Shakespeare. Implicit in both of their approaches is an understanding that their subjects are human. If they weren't then their work would have been less likely to be relevant. Wilson is Church of England and maybe his ex-wife was, too, but the C. of E. in recent decades has been quite liberal on belief in God and perhaps they have an inkling that gods are the product of man's imagination.

Where the tradition Sunday School Jesus was meek and mild and suffered little children to come unto him, we come away from Wilson with the impression of a firebrand preacher who wanted Jews to be better Jews, not establish his own church. He was a troublesome political figure crucified by the Roman rulers. Similarly, Shakespeare, on account of his sublime writing, was elevated to the sweet Swan of Avon who charmed everyone who met him and understood the human situation sympathetically. Such an account overlooks the litigious businessman building a portfolio of investments, a misogynist with an ongoing disgust towards women and an obsession with establishing his gentlemanly status. Both built up sizeable followings in their lifetimes while both would surely be astonished not only at their influence over 2000 and over 400 years later but also the myths and legends put about by their subsequent followers that have become so widely accepted.

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One last aspect of the KDJ book is her setting out of the last part of Shakespeare's career before retirement circa 1613. Throughout her book she has very sceptical about the success of the marriage to Anne and she is consistent in explaining that the purchase of the Blackfriars gatehouse with three trustees was a move to prevent the property being left to her. 

She was writing before the discovery of the letter addressed to 'Good Mrs. Shakespaire' which has been dated to the 1600's. With William living as a 'lodger' in Silver Street from circa 1604, any credence given to that letter might need to be put nearer to 1610. The purchase of the gatehouse is not until March 1613. The incumbent there on Shakespeare's death, John Robinson, could plausibly have been in his service.

Anne being in London circa 1610 fits with the idea of some reconciliation that is reflected in the themes of the 'late plays' that were written from then onwards. But it doesn't look like such a complete reconciliation that such an asset was to be left to her. And the famous difficulties of interpreting what the bequest of the 'second best bed' in the will is meant to mean. None of which makes it impossible to form an idea of what was happening. There is no need to explain away every detail in a convoluted way and come up with a story that fits it all in for the sake of it. We don't know for sure and it's best to say as much.

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But a third title of the seven shortlisted for Best Book in the House is on a comparable theme. KDJ is quick to correct the often-heard truism that 'not much is known about Shakespeare's life'. Not enough, certainly, but quite a bit. Not all of it reliable, as in the case of Jesus Christ. But much more guesswork and assuming are needed if one wants to imagine the life of Vermeer, another raised to quasi-saintly status on the back of the tremendous legacy left in his work. Due, possibly next up, as I re-read the best books I've ever read, is Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World, which isn't a life of Vermeer but alongside Carel Fabritius and Pieter de Hooch, he is one of the foremost in the greatest Golden Age anywhere in any genre, Dutch C17th Painting. Not everybody will agree. There is a time around 1720 when European music was doing especially well. There was 1971 when pop music was very wonderful for the most part.

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On a slightly less elevated level, I'm most gratified that my mate, Kev, has chosen my poem, Romanticism, to read at an ongoing local event where readers recite poems from memory. I said I could thus attend in support and if one was required to perform I could do Rainyday Woman which I do know. Gladly, in what is a wise guideline, one isn't supposed to do one's own poems and one hardly wants to instigate a celebration of oneself.

What I do like, though, is how people choose poems of mine, when required, that are among the best of them. Over the years that has also included The Cathedrals of Liverpool, Windy Miller and Situation. There is something reassuring about others liking the one's I like best. It would be awful if none of my favourites ever got a mention and people chose titles that, in retrospect, might have been lucky to get into print. There are a few of those.

One thing KDJ says about Shakespeare's late plays is how they are 'backward-looking', partly at his own career, like The Tempest. He was only 52 when he died but he seemed to know he had done enough. Again, not imagining myself quite in the same league, I have been spending some time reviewing the oeuvre, aged 66. Poems rarely came in battalions but single spies and they come less often than ever. But I'd rather have one worth having per year- when it used to be four- than none at all. It isn't over til it's over.    

Retirement Diary

Anecdotal Evidence today reflects on the realities of retirement. I'll soon be six years in, well aware that when meeting retired people some years ago and asking how long it had been and they said 'xx years', I thought it sounded like forever. Except, of course, it doesn't feel like it to the incumbent of those years, in yet another one of those tricks that time plays on us. 

Maryann Corbett looks like a name worth reading more of.

Meanwhile, mention of seeing a Vermeer from a correspondent coincided with me realizing that not all my art books were shelved together. In among the misplaced batch was the sumptuous catalogue of the Pieter de Hooch exhibition in Dulwich in 1998. And if retirement is about anything it's about reading and gazing at such a thing while proceeding through more of the Complete Bach. Followed by The Hissing of Summer Lawns in an attempt to play a pop record once in a while.

C17th Dutch painting is the choice Golden Age of all Golden Ages. Some might say C18th music with Bach and Handel, maybe Shakespeare is a one man show, 1960's Tamla Motown, please insert your own examples. But Vermeer, de Hooch, Carel Fabritius and their contemporaries up to and including Rembrandt, set a miraculous standard. Quiet, domestic and suburban, Delft was something of a backwater to host a gathering like them, apparently not thriving economically and it's true that many painters went to the more cosmopolitan and more lucrative Amsterdam. 

One thing you need for a Golden Age is outrageous talent and it doesn't take long looking at what we have from Delft to begin to recognize that but then one notices how short-lived those three, at least, were. Fabritius was so cruelly killed by the massive gunpowder explosion aged 32. Vermeer, at 43, apparently by something like a stroke or heart attack in reduced circumstances and de Hooch at 54 after seven years in the asylum about which no more is known. It's no use at all to them that their stories add a patina of sadness to their brilliant lives. There may or may not be a connection between the hard times of Vermeer and de Hooch who could have fared better in Amsterdam but Fabritius is another case entirely.

Look how many ways de Hooch recesses backwards through doors and windows, and into another painting, in this. The gentle foreground scene is extended into other places where perhaps even less is happening. He didn't have to do that but time and again he does it. 

 

And this detail is spectacular. No need for guns and shooting, charging horses or Trump in the role of Jesus Christ for that matter. This is heroic, not only to think that anything so ostensibly mundane was worth representing in art but to do it so magnificently. To contemplate such a thing is what retirement and not having to attend paid employment was surely intended for.

 

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

The Year in Review

It's easy to nominate the Book of the Year for 2025. However few new books I read in a year, I'd do well to find one better than Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found if I read them all. One can read lots of books on one's preferred subjects- Shakespeare biography, Handel, Shostakovich, Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin and find much the same material re-arranged in the cause of whatever angle the author adopts but Graham-Dixon genuinely seemed to be breaking new ground. It's hard to see Vermeer Studies going much further- at least for a long time - and so that accolade is easily decided.

There simply weren't enough, or hardly any, new records I heard this year - or books of poetry, or novels- to constitute categories. In recent years it has been Event of the Year, rather than Poem or Poetry Collection, that has provided any internal debate and it has usually meant 'concert'. Now might be a good time to separate out 'concert' from 'event'. It's not obvious how one can compare an hour or so of live music performance with places, buildings or even any other days out and, mundane as it may seem, the arrival of the bus pass made for quite an occasion.

It was hard for the second half of the year to maintain the sublime standards set in the first half by Angelina Kopyrina's Prokofiev Sonata no. 7, gorgeously supported by Beethoven, the Petersfield Orchestra's vast, vibrant and voluble Shostakovich Symphony no. 10 and the Renaissance Choir's Allegri Miserere, starring Jenni Halliday, along with that of James MacMillan. They each fully satisfied the criteria of the visceral thrill that usually separates out the very greatest things from the good and very good. They would all be very worthy Concerts of the Year, making the deepest of impressions but, not for the first time, it's going to have to be the Renaissance Choir, for the Allegri Miserere. 

My visit back to Nottingham was hugely worthwhile and it's hard to know if the remains of my own long ago made more of an impression than that of others in Lincoln Cathedral and Lichfield where the Dr. Johnson Birthplace Museum was an added bonus. Some things from earlier in the year, looking through the diary, seem a very long time ago now which is another of those tricks of time but at least provides the illusion that one is getting good value from retirement. There's a few events that are only sitting in pubs with friends but I don't mean 'only' to put any doubt on their importance because they might easily be counted the most important. Neither can buying second-hand records in a charity shop, surely, count as an Event of the Year but when it's the Complete Works of Bach, it counts as a contender. It has to go down as a good year, even up to yesterday when I achieved a new personal best rating at Lichess, for Bullet, at 1843.

But coming at the time that it did with all its strangeness and vestigial familiarity, Nottingham has to be my Event of the Year. 

The future of the concert reviews is ever in doubt as 'the language burns out long before the music ever does' but I've been saying that for a long time, they haven't stopped yet and since 2026 begins with Cuarteto Casals in Wigmore Hall playing the lifelong favourite, Shos 3, I really ought to come back re-invigorated. I am forever in the debt of those artists that continue to make it all worthwhile.

Andrew Graham-Dixon - Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found

 Andrew Graham-Dixon, Vermeer, A Life Lost and Found (Allen Lane)

As with Shakespeare, we are told very little is known about Vermeer so one wouldn't expect it to take a 360 page book to cover their lives. Plentiful background and a good deal of informed speculation are the main ingredients with which authors fill out their work. It's useful and one wouldn't want to take the artist out of context but Vermeer isn't born until page 78 out of the 327 of the main text here. We are by then, however, well informed about the Thirty Years War - which might explain why Vermeer's earliest known paintings have one or two soldiers in them, his mentor, Gerard Der Borch and the likeable, liberal Protestants, the Remonstrants, dissidents in a time of Calvinism, into which part of the community he was born.  

History is all too often the story of war and carnage and the Thirty Years War was pro rata the most expensive in lives lost. The Remonstrants' more open attitude to religious faith could be interpreted as 'enlightenment' and so it is tempting to see Vermeer's clear, calm pictures with light being let in as a product of a newly achieved peaceable territory that values its humanity. 16 years old when it ended, Vermeer had arrived at an opportune time to benefit. 

The point of all the peripheral detail becomes clear. The abusive marriage of Vermeer's mother-in-law explains why Catharina Bolnes was so attracted to Vermeer as a husband, because he was, as far as can be told, not violent, not misogynist and,

would spend much of his life painting pictures of women that radiate empathy and tenderness.

which we are ready to believe on the evidence of his art but we might bear in mind that those biographers of Shakespeare who find him so attractive a personality on account of his gift for writing might not be deducing as much reliably.

But Graham-Dixon brings great scholarship to his readings of the paintings and finds great depths of religious imagery, not least in a nail in a wall in two paintings, an idea likely to have been lifted from Rembrandt, symbolizing the crucifixion. If no word is wasted in a good poem then surely no brushstroke is recondite in a good painting.  

So, the 'sphinx of Delft', at least in the first part of his career, turns out to have been a religious painter. It might seem important to have known that about one's favourite artist but the 'sphinx' aspect of what are such luminous pictures is in a way more attractive than the fuller understanding of them. We can enjoy things without appreciating them properly. In fact, once completely bottomed out there's nothing left to know and so perhaps the mystery is part of their appeal. But one can hardly ignore the main premise of this brilliant book, it only makes Vermeer an even more involving artist than the one we thought we knew.

His best work was nearly all done for one patron in a period of not much more than a decade. In Maria Thins he has a mother-in-law that would give credence to the work of Bernard Manning and a ready-made baddie in a story in which our hero all but stops doing his paintings in the period before his death, aged 43. I'm distressed to find that the Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, c.1665, as per the print on the wall just to my left here, is 'coarse' and,

the picture as a whole is lacking in conviction. It looks like a Vermeer, but with the lights switched off.

I might try to find some decadent glamour in the idea of the genius in decline but that picture might have to go. But I find some resonance in how,

Demoralized by the return of war, saddened by personal loss, and dispirited by the realization that a thousand years of promised peace was not going to begin any time soon, he may have been so deeply disappointed there was no coming back from it.

I make no claim whatsoever to anything like the things that Vermeer went through but find a much diminished parallel with how, when young in the 1960's and 70's, anything seemed possible and some good things happened but, later on in life, the future looked bleak again.

What's so great about Vermeer is his frugal output, the possibly unfathomable depth of his best work, the outrageous talent apparently so quietly, almost anonymously, applied to what few pieces he left behind and what seems to be not much interest in doing any more than what he did, a few important things among which are lost.

And what's great about Andrew Graham-Dixon is how he has so rigorously and objectively set out his ground-breaking thesis without falling into quite the same idolatry that certain Shakespeare authorities can't help but become victims of. Without the evidence that Vermeer was beyond reproach, he only finds nothing to reproach him with and that allows us to think what we will of him while taken aback by his art.  

New Acquisition - Nightingale Night VII

I don't think it's made headline news in the international art market but a new record was set earlier this week when I paid more than I've ever done before for an art work, Nightingale Night VII by Maggi Hambling. While the price paid can easily be found from the Pallant House Gallery shop, it goes undisclosed here except to say i8t is the year's profit from the turf or this month's Premium Bond pay out but not both.

Some philistines might say any child could produce such a daub when first presented with paint and canvas, as they might produce something superficially like some contemporary classical music if given an instrument, but I've long wanted some sort of authentic Maggi on a wall so it's another ambition achieved.

It's not yet ideally framed but we'll see about that. The handwritten, signed poem, The Wound by Thom Gunn, has moved across to the wall at the side to make way for it in the prime spot above the computer.

 

Maggi Hambling: Nightingale night

 Maggi Hambling, Nightingale Night, Pallant House, Chichester, until April 27

It was good to find that the new Maggi Hambling paintings were in Chichester and didn't involve a more demanding excursion to London. I go whenever I can to see her exhibitions.

There was a time when she was most definitely a figurative painter but she's moved towards more abstract means as the decades have gone by. 

She's certainly no Vermeer, the paint runs down the canvas having been applied with more flourish than delicacy, perhaps. As in the previous waves and waterfalls, one finds what one can that has come about in the process. The crescent moon in the painting representing P.J. Harvey in concert is a deliberate act but the female figure one thinks one sees emerging from the sea is one of many things that are more sub-conscious. That painting is the most complex with its extended palette on a white canvas but for the most part the rest are on black, or dark, and predominantly gold.

Done after a night spent in woodland, these are spectral images, a bit Hallowe'en and reward much longer contemplation than most who come and go, not necessarily talking of Michelangelo, in order to achieve an effect that, in Room 4, could have become comparable to the experience of the Rothko Chapel. What one doesn't get except from seeing them in the flesh is the range of sizes they come in, from 30x25 cm in Nightingale Night XIII to Night of the Lotus Eaters at 198x226.

There may or may not have been a braying horse and a crippled giraffe in the latter and it's in the nature of the dripping paint that Portuguese Man'o'War are not uncommon. There might well be self-portraits lurking in the sub-text of others while Will Young is more readily recognizable than Leonard Cohen as the musical theme is extended from that of birdsong. We are told, also, that the vulnerability of the balance in nature and, thus, climate change are themes and maybe that comes out of the imaginings one has as to whether it is a fish or toad one has seen.

It is a captivating exhibition but it hepls that I attend with the intention of being captivated. But my devotion is such that I went as far as buying the limited edition print and so had plenty to think about, concentrating on conveying that home on the bus safely.

Dora Carrington is possibly the more major show in Pallant House at present, the first such for thirty years. She's no less bohemian than Maggi, a more vivid colourist, quieter and morte concerned with detail. While being Bloomsbury fringe, they were very much taken up with each other and not only one at a time. The bookish, ascetic Lytton Strachey puts in a number of appearances, most revealingly with some more frivolous behaviour in some home video footage.

Although self-effacing, her art has some of that Gwen John quality of craft and technique and only the unusual Spanish Landscape with Mountains, 1924, is really outside of her steady remit. That she shot herself in the head after Lytton's death, as in the last moments of Merchant-Ivory film, suggests more than it completely explains.

Brush Strokes

 While it's diverting to do something out of one's comfort zone once in a while, it might be best if we don't do it too often. I undertook to finish the bathroom by painting it myself. It makes a change from stringing likely-sounding words into sentences. But whoever thought that academic work was somehow better than such artisan endeavour had it all wrong.

I've painted the bathroom once before and don't remember getting up into the top corners being quite such a challenge how ever many years ago that was. It's a young man's game on the top step at full stretch with one false move by someone so unused to such balancing acts offering a wide choices to bang one's head once and for all. This body, this vessel that I move about in, could once run or ride bikes for long distances, bowl eight overs at a time and do forward rolls at least into its thirties but aches and pains, not all of them psychosomatically, do their best to provide warnings. Early doors I was considering getting my favourite handyman to do it but I don't like to feel entirely useless just yet.

I can't do it all today. Maybe it's past halfway. I like the feeling of having done something useful, or tried, however badly. I have renewed admiration for those who can do such things, especially those one sees walking round on rooftops. They must know what they are doing.

There's probably a German word for 'the shame felt on realizing that what one does is of no intrinsic value'. What use have roofers for a theory that Shakespeare's kids weren't really all his own. What actual use is it to anybody compared to plumbing. What good is a write-up about a musical event or a book of poems compared to re-wiring the house. Is it the worst feeling one can have to end up thinking that one's life has been a waste of time.

Not entirely wasted, having enjoyed so much of it, but self-indulgent to say the least. And having enjoyed re-reading Benjamin Moser's The World Turned Upside-Down, I moved swiftly on to do the same with Laura Cumming's Thunderclap on very much the same subject and done in a similar way. Last year I think I preferred Laura but this time I'm more taken with Benjamin, notwithstanding his unnecessarily long coda, They are both fine writers and do much to enhance our appreciation of that exceptional period in painting but Benjamin demonstrates his Pulitzer credentials by finding more, possibly due to having spent twenty years on his book.

There. That feels a bit better already, back in the liberal arts and considering them of ultimate consequence whereas most people can manage without Carel Fabritius but there comes a time when bathrooms need some maintenance. There's painting and then there's painting. That could be the last time, I don't know.

Recent Poetry Books - Kathryn Gray and Sue Hubbard

Kathryn Gray, Hollywood or Home; Sue Hubbard, God's Little Artist (both Seren) 

Not as much new poetry arrives here as it once did. Not much at all, really. There must be some worth having being published but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. I'm not looking very hard, it must be said. But, one thing leading to another, here's some I found. 

Kathryn Gray read Bournemouth at the Evening with Rosemary Tonks in Soho a couple of weeks ago, imagining meeting the recluse on the seafront. Any friend of Rosemary's is a friend of mine and Kathryn's poem is an evocative tribute, its slow rhythms not like Rosemary's world-weary, often bleary-eyed confessions but after conjuring Dover Beach becomes both intimate and infinite admitting that she is,

           afraid of my own mind.

'Exploring celebrity culture', as the back cover says the book does, wouldn't be a theme I'd expect to be taken with myself so the selection of celebrities comes with some pleasant surprises - the poets, at least - in Dorothy Parker, Roddy Lumsden and Michael Donaghy. One can tell by its reference points that this is one's sort of book.

The Portable Dorothy Parker works a bit like a loose sestina, each stanza using the words 'blood' and 'shot' and most using 'cabinet' and 'gun' but Kathryn's poems are smart casual more than formal, as disciplined as they feel like being rather than insisting on strict adherence to rhyme or metre. Dorothy Parker is, like its heroine, a less deceived tour de force,

                                            When I love someone, I love them more

than they want to be loved. If they weren't already dead they'd sleep with a gun.

There is a Rosemary-like dissatisfaction in these poems, often attended to with a Dorothy-like attitude. For all their knowing worldliness they are most often in search of lost innocence but once lost innocence is not something that can be regained.

The problem with Donald is like the problem with Donald. Trying to speak of the unspeakable is a hiding to nothing and yet one can hardly not say anything. The Trump poem reduces itself to simplistic statements, repeats itself, is chronically angry at its own pitiful limitations and makes empty claims for itself and as such gets somewhere near its subject but more depth could be achieved if its subject was a more engaging character, like Donald Duck, because Trump's complexities are only manifested in his one-dimensional hideousness so the poem is a creditable attempt at an impossible job. Poems from the pamphlet, Flowers, including the title poem about a singer called Brandon whose work has almost entirely passed me by, are included here and I'm surprised to find I have all the Kathryn Gray there is in print. I thought there'd be more but it's a good idea to publish fewer books and make sure they are good ones. 

I'm not quite such a Sue Hubbard completist. I think it's her first books I have but I lost track of her writing on art somewhere along the line.

God's Little Artist is a verse biography of Gwen John, not so long ago the subject of a major exhibition in Pallant House, Chichester. It's not an easy thing to do but four pages of prose biography by way of introduction provide the story and then the poems are as vignettes to follow.

In Attic, it is as visual as the series of gorgeuosly quiet, pale paintings of that room in Paris, a print of one of which is on the wall over to my left but on that one the window is closed, but at its best poetry is music if it's anything at all and these poems have a gentle music that complements the paintings as well as touch, smell and all the senses that accumulate to evoke the limited but powerful palette of them, too. Again, like all poems worth having, they are better appreciated on subsequent readings than on the first. The phrase 'subtle tonalities' used by Sue to describe the paintings applies equally to her poems. 

Perhaps the highlight of the whole book, though, entirely satisfying as it is, is the quote from Georges Simenon,

'Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness'.

Yes, I dare say gloriously happy people don't stop to brood on their lives in poems, music or painting but it is just as true to say that those things at their best can bring more than adequate consolation which is something the unconsidered life lacks.

Seren has never been less than a highly likeable imprint and these two books only enhance that idea.

 

Benjamin Moser, The World Turned Upside Down

Benjamin Moser, The World Turned Upside Down (Allen Lane)

C17th Dutch Painting is one of those periods, like 1960's Detroit in pop music, that brought together a rare collection of talent to make a Golden Age. With Laura Cumming's Thunderclap on the same subject already a highlight of the year, one wants more and Benjamin Moser's investment of twenty years' work is a satisfyingly solid, weighty thing to pick up.

The first news to me is that the latest thinking is that Vermeer didn't use a camera obscura so at least now we know he either didn't or he did. 

Among the many of Benjamin's profound observations comes,

There are many people with artistic talent. But only a handful succeed, and these are not always the most talented. Success requires another talent: the talent to discover opportunities to use that talent.

That is in the context of Gerard Ter Borch, who was no Rembrandt, but whose work succeeded then and is remembered now. A recurrent motif, alongside having very little biographical information about many of these painters, is not being able to see in their pictures that which was obvious to their contemporaries.

Van Meegeren's fame as a faker of obviously sub-standard Vermeers is an aberration, as if tribute bands were of as much interest as the original artists but the inclusion of so many plates of the ensemble portraits of Frans Hals is a mystery to me when such luxury could have been better expended on other artists. However, it does serve to emphasize the disjunction between the prosperity of those he painted and the crippling debts he amassed around him. Even so, while a lot of these artists died young, with Vermeer making it to 43 being relatively long-lived, Frans Hals makes it to 84 and thus there's more of his work than of those whose time ran out too soon.

Benjamin Moser is a paragon example of one of those writers who likes to appear in his own books even though, in this case, he wasn't a C17th Dutch painter. Until two-thirds of the way through, that seemed intrusive and beside the point but then he has a few pages describing his life in Utrecht and makes it sound such an idyllic place that I'd like to go there, too, perhaps on the European Tour of Lubeck and places associated with Bach that I'm never going to do. See. That's how easy it is to sidetrack into talking about oneself. But, after his eulogy to Utrecht, which is apparently like Amsterdam without the seamy downside, I liked Benjamin much more. 

Dutch art is contrasted with Italian for its 'realism' rather than 'idealizing' and that is a good starting point for understanding why Rembrandt is better than Botticelli. Adriaen  Coorte, and his amazing Still Life with Three Medlars and a Butterfly, achieves the quality of symbolism without the least pretension to being symbolic....shutting off the intellect and appealing directly to the senses,

like music can and, in Benjamin's account, like a poem by Bashō.

By the time he finishes leading us through all the paintings there, he's won me over and I like him. I had thought for most of the way I much preferred Laura Cumming but there's no need to choose when you can have both. 

However, in the Afterword he indulges in some further reflections on his life and going back to America, which is good, mostly sad and convincing but whether it belongs as a coda to tis book's proper purpose is less clear. Until I remember that Laura's book was also about her painter father, and her early life with him and so maybe that is how books are written now, openly acknowledging their subjectivity and incorporating their reasons for being written.

It is a glorious area to read about but maybe not as easy to write about as Moser and Cumming make it look. As Benjamin doesn't quite say but certainly implies in his final thoughts, this compact little nation at the height of its commercial and artistic powers is a fine place to escape to when one finds the present failing, unsatisfactory and, like it isn't for me, who is a generation older than him, not as good as we were led to believe it was going to be.

It's a pleasure

 The report, somewhere below, that Yuja Wang's Rachmaninov had arrived proved to be premature. The envelope contained some Elgar. It is not always a good idea to guess. In fact, that order for the much anticipated Yuja discs is not going to be fulfilled and Amazon, for why I don't know, can't promise to get it here before mid-October, from America.

However, Presto are all their name suggests they are and, augmenting the order with Errollyn's Piano Concerto and then the first recordings by Daniel Barenboim to treat oneself to some Shostakovich rather than pay postage, I can't see why I won't be putting more business their way.

My favourite literary website, Anecdotal Evidence, brought Stevie Smith back to notice today which, to my surprise, led to the ordering of her best-known novel, that on yellow paper, a biography and some stories and essays in Me, Again. I hadn't regarded her as much beyond a kindly eccentric but, as a reading crisis emerges on the horizon, she is going to get her chance.

The Rembrandt book stays firmly on the front room floor, being more than I really need to know, and Vasari is lively in the translation by the Bondanella's who make him sound suspiciously contemporary but already the lives are beginning to sound similar and I might, possibly wrongly, edit them down to the famous names.

However, that Uccello sacrificed so much of his talent in pursuit of perspective and didn't know the difference between a camel and a chameleon is worth reading about, as is the opening paragraph on Duccio (c.1255- c.1316), that,

No doubt those who are the inventors of anything notable attract the greatest attention from historians, and this occurs because new inventions are more closely observed and held in greater amazement, due to the pleasure to be found in the newness of things,

 

in which I think he's endorsing incremental progress, in such things as perspective and technique, rather than anything superficially radical. Brought forward to now, rather than his own time - died 1574, he surely must mean how Beethoven developed from Mozart, James Joyce from George Moore or Shakespeare from Marlowe rather than any idea that anybody turned up and successfully started doing anything in an entirely new way. He's good and I'm glad to see how he makes 'pleasure' such a priority in art appreciation. I might miss much worth having by skipping a couple of hundred of the 500 pages that end with Titian but it will always be there to go back to which is the perennial beauty of one's own library. Not only are books, and records, immensely good value to read or listen to once, but they will always be there for as long as one wants them. Unless one temporarily loses all reason and lets one's pop vinyl go for a mere £120.

That was madness and I regret it more every time I think about it. 

High Art and Low Life

There simply can't be many biographies as good to read as Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio. Admittedly, he has more to work with, as far as a tense action thriller requires, than Andrew Motion or James Booth had with the life of their university librarian poet, but it's a brilliantly organized story over and above its sensational content.

Caravaggio's art, it seems, benefitted from his lack of formal training. It would be difficult to think of anyone whose sublime talent was at quite such odds with their turbulent, troubled life. Before he died aged 38, he had spent several years on the run from the crimes he left behind him, most of which were generated by a volatile personality in conflict with a finely-graded social system in which slights and disrespect were readily the cause of grievances that needed to be settled.

Brilliant though his paintings clearly are, his subject matter alone couldn't make him a major favourite because I'll have the Dutch from a few years later any day but Graham-Dixon's explanations show how much was in them. By the age of 38, though, whether due to injuries sustained or not, he was well into decline, usin his chiaroscuro technique to hide his shortcomings in darkness.

It is remarkable how much of the desperado life can be pieced together from such disparate sources but there remain inevitable gaps and the exact circumstances of the last few days, trying to get back to Rome, separated from the paintings on the boat he had been going on before he was detained, would either be better to know, or not.

For me, an artist's story should be that of tremendous early work, a middle period of masterpieces and maybe a sad decline. I'm not sure I'm going to try to claim that Shakespeare suffered that but the last plays aren't quite Hamlet; I had the feeling that Seamus Heaney was going over old ground in his last two books but Patrick Hamilton, who had written such fine novels, turned in no more than his outline of a work in progress in Unknown Assailant.

 

Caravaggio on film was done by Derek Jarman and the DVD can be had for less than a fiver and so I'll have one. I'm in no hurry to return to the overly scholarly Schwartz Rembrandt and Tales from the Colony Room looks no better than it should be so next up is likely to be A.N. Wilson's Paul, who was possibly the inventor of Christianity, not Jesus Christ who, it might say, never said he was anything but Jewish. Maybe Paul's got a lot to answer for but we can rely on Wilson to put a contrary slant on it.

Books about such faraway times and places have the advantage of all their contemporary detail, as far as it can be understood, or misunderstood, and so Shakespeare's London, Caravaggio's Rome and Paul's Mediterranean travels can be made more vividly of interest than a walk up the Copnor Road to Tesco Express although I'm sure they'd be very taken by the opportunity to see suburban Portsmouth in 2023.

--

Racetrack Wiseguy writes - Diego Velazquez was worth waiting for yesterday, 2.4m gns worth of Frankel progeny, especially at 4/6 when returned at 2/5 and coming home alone.

Hold your bets, though, on next year's classics. Aidan O'Brien has a jigsaw puzzle to do, over the winter rather than just yet, in deciding which horses to send where in order to win everything and there will be more 2yo's to be seen yet, probably from him but hopefully from somebody else, too.

Diego did the necessary business to get me past the latest milestone in accumulated profit for the year. It's been a steadily, gradually winning summer and that's all I expect of it. Extrapolating the year so far across the remaining four and a half months would break last year's record but that's not the game. Winning at all is good enough.

It's necessary to understand that. Unlike the Daily Express a few weeks ago who appeared to think that the rate of inflation being reduced made us better off. No, it means we're still getting worse off but not quite as quickly.

Perhaps they were Liz Truss's economic advisors in disguise or, like just happened on Sounds of the 70's, they thought that Creedence Clearwater Revival's I Heard It Through the Grapevine was 'Better than the Original' ( !!! ).

One presses on regardless. Letsbefrankaboutit was a well-backed favourite from an in-form stable in the first at the Curragh this afternoon. It was a big field and so I even looked at the alleged draw advantage, found it to be 'high' and so thought 15 out of 16 was a good thing.

It easily won the race on his side but finished nearly 4 lengths behind the horse drawn 4 on the other.

It not being something I usually look at, being mostly a jumping man and not liking big fields on the flat, I don't even know what 'high' means. Maybe two horses drawn on the other side of the Curragh's wide open spaces were better horses. Chepstow in October can't come soon enough for me.

 

1610

Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio is an exemplary biography, bringing together the turbulent life and the dramatic paintings in a well-organized, authoritative but always entertaining account.

Caravaggio is painting's bad boy in what is quite a competitive field. His regular involvement in street fights and his swords and daggers might not have been quite as extraordinary in Rome in 1600 but he takes part in more than his fair share. Neither is the mixture of 'sacred and profane', with his Bible story art, quite the contradiction it might seem to us by now because those stories were as familiar to people then as any film story would be today and the churches that employed him was central to the culture. He would have been at least as familiar with the gospels as I was with the Top 40 in 1971 or the work of Philip Larkin, Tamla Motown or the form of the top National Hunt horses now.

One thing often leads to another and I am reminded that I never did get round to reading A.N. Wilson's Paul. I have developed a morbid fascination with the unsympathetic, unrepentant, blindly self-interested right-wing types at least since the Leave campaign, continuing on through the calamitous careers of Boris, Liz Truss and their fellow travellers like Jacob, Nadine and, of course, Trump. Paul appears to be a similar sort of figure but Wilson's book looks like it presents an alternative view and if it's anything like as convincing as his Jesus, it should be invigorating.

Caravaggio, though, also makes me wonder which year had the greatest accumulation of creative genius alive at the same time.

I'm tempted by the years 1606-1610, between the birth of Rembrandt and the death of Caravaggio. Rembrandt might not have yet begun to contemplate his first self portrait by the age of 4 but he was there, toddling about in Leiden, in 1610. Shakespeare was in London coming up with Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale; Monteverdi in Venice presented his masterpiece Vespers and also at work were William Byrd, Cervantes, John Donne and Ben Jonson.

That's not a bad list.

I'm not sure that Bach, Handel and their many composer friends get enough support from literature and painting from 1720-1750 or whether 1910-ish - with James Joyce, Picasso, Virginia Woolf, Schonberg, Sibelius, T. S. Eliot, Hardy and all amounts to quite as much. Neither Shakespeare or Bach can claim their periods as winners on their own- I want a spread across all genres- but they certainly offer sure foundations.

What about now. It's less clear which names even constitute such 'greatness' while it's happening. Perhaps the equivalent of amateur internet commentators in 1610 weren't aware of what momentous times they were living in, or had more pressing things to attend to.

Is it James MacMillan, Tracey Emin, Julian Barnes, Maggi Hambling, Paul McCartney, Paul Muldoon and Joni Mitchell. Burt Bacharach was still alive earlier this year.

I don't imagine it being David Hockney, Roger McGough, Taylor Swift, Kae Tempest and Mark-Anthony Turnage but it isn't up to me. It's just not going to be 2023, though, is it.    

Boxgrove Priory and Gwen John

I had a day out, making use of the £2 bus fares to visit Boxgrove Priory, of which I'd been only vaguely aware until being invited to a concert there that I probably can't go to but it looked worth investigating even without a choir in it. There's two of them, really. There's one of the ruins that Henry knocked about a lot and a newer one, notwithstanding my most favourite theme for a photo, a cemetery full of mostly time-worn and weather-beaten headstones that no longer record the names of those they were made to commemorate.

Inside, the organ was being maintained by a young organ builder and it's not every day you meet one of them. 

Idyllic, and modest, hidden away off the beaten track, it's hardly Wells Cathedral but if Wells is a big, strapping Beethoven symphony, Boxgrove is a tidy little miniature by Chopin in a village that presumably knows it's gorgeous but seems to go about its business like Camberwick Green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 With time on my side, changing bus at Chichester, it was convenient to include the Gwen John exhibition at Pallant House, especially as this summer has found itself nominated as a deeper excursion into painting.

It was a surprise to find that the Corner of a Room in Paris is only about 10"x7", having become so accustomed to it at 19x16 in a print that came free with the Sunday paper many years ago that had been in the front room but now furnishes a corner of the new, blue room. Reproductions should really reproduce the scale of the original because the artist must have had their reasons but, no, we wants pictures to be the right dimensions for us and not how big or small they made them.

Gwen is more austere and muted than her brother, Augustus, and in a well thought-out show, comparisons were readily available with Whistler, who we might see as her most significant reference point if not mentor, Rodin and Sickert. But the highlight for me was the side-by-side, intertextual connection with Hammershøi. At first, from a distance, I thought, blimey, that one's a lot like Hammershøi, only to find that's exactly what it was when close enough to read the label. So there's not much wrong with what I know about the art I know about, it's just most of those written up by Vasari that I'm not so sure about.

It was busy in there considering it's been on for a while now. I don't know where so many discerning, vaguely bohemian types can come from. They don't live round my way. It wasn't because it's the first week of the school holidays because there were no children in there. Boxgrove Priory and Pallant House are places one can go to hide from them.

But one has to reserve top markings and superlatives for the likes of the recent Messiah because if one reports everything as being unbelieveably tremendous there's nothing left to say when something is even better.

Gwen John was a fine painter, quiet but not quite as quiet as Hammershøi. She belongs with Whistler more than she does with her brother. We are offered a few by Vuillard, by way of contrast, it seems to me. I'd rather have had more versions of the room in Paris aspiring to abstraction, of which there are a few - window open, window closed, it makes all the difference - than four versions of some of the same restrained portraits.

 

One has to be strict and not dish out Grade A's all over the place like an examiner who's been told to make it look as if the education system is working. It's an 8 or maybe 9/10 exhibition about a 7/10 painter, on a scale on which you need to be Vilhelm Hammershøi or Maggi Hambling to get an 8.

These are all very convincing poems but that is easier for them to do than it is for poetry whose words are expected to say what they mean.

 

Until October 8th.