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Some Notes on Parrot Symbolism in Poetry and Religious Art

 When I took a guided tour of William Burges’s gothic revival church in the grounds of Studley Royal, I was struck by the way the chancel was decorated with highly coloured relief carvings of parrots. I asked the guide, David Thornton, about their significance and he didn’t know. But we decided to explore the matter further and keep in touch. What follows is the result of our joint explorations.

 Macrobius records that, after the battle of Actium, where Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra, a parrot greeted the victor, “Ave Caesar” – “Hail, Caesar!” Ever since the first parrot was brought back from India by Alexander the Great, parrots were thought to be miraculous because they spoke with a human voice. And what they generally said was “Ave”, the Latin greeting. Because of their miraculous ability to talk, gorgeous plumage and rarity, parrots were highly valued and used as gifts between kings and emperors. The parrot’s greeting to Octavian, later Augustus Caesar, was subsequently, in the Christian era, taken to be a pre-figuring of the angelic greeting, “Ave Maria.” The parrot was thus associated with the Virgin Mary.

It is not clear whether this association is the only route by which the parrot came to symbolise the Virgin Mary. But Boehrer, in his book “Parrot Culture,” (2004), cites a Middle English Dictionary as defining “papejai” as (i) a parrot and (ii) a lady, the Virgin Mary. He suggests that the rarity, value and decorative qualities of the parrot help make it represent ladies generally: “and the Virgin, most precious and delicate lady of all, stands in for all the others.”

Perhaps the most explicit evidence comes from the poet John Lydgate (C15th) in his Balade in Commendation of Our Lady, where he hails the Virgin Mary as a “popynjay plumed in clennesse.”  The term “popynjay” (popinjay) comes from the Old French “papingay” meaning parrot, which itself derives from Arabic. Of course, in English from Shakespeare’s time at least the term “popinjay” is used to describe someone foppishly over-dressed and vain. But clearly, for Lydgate, the connotations of rarity and high value are what he has in mind. The term “clennesse” refers to moral and sexual purity. And the term ‘popinjay’ is the term for parrots in traditional heraldry. They would not be used on coats of arms to denote foppish vanity! They had, partly from the Middle East, connotations of wisdom and courage, and possibly more religious connotations.

Around 1400, the term “papiayes” is used in Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight in the heraldic description of the cloak that the ladies of the court embroider for Gawain when setting out on his quest. It is significant that Gawain should be afforded the protection of the Virgin Mary, as symbolised by the parrots, since one of the major challenges for Gawain on his quest is to retain his sexual purity while still maintaining his reputation for courtesy.

It is worth noting that Boeher mentions two medieval church vestments embroidered with popinjays – we may presume with religious, Marian significance. After all, since the medieval mind found symbols and correspondences in everything, the use of parrots was certainly not merely for decorative effect but for spiritual meaning!

The parrot often appears alongside the Virgin Mary in art. Richard Verdi’s “The Parrot in Art” traces the parrot from Dürer to the modern day, but there are even earlier instances. Clearly, not all these parrots symbolise the Virgin, but Crivelli (c1481), Dürer, Baldung, Mantegna, Schongauer, Van Eyck and the Ms painting by the Egerton Master all feature a parrot with the Virgin.

In an image from the Zaragoza version of the“Defensorium” by Fransiscus de Retz (1343-1427), a ferocious-looking parrot has a scroll issuing from its beak saying, “Ave.” It immediately follows an image of the Annunciation. The text beneath the parrot illustration seems to refer to a medieval folk-belief mentioned in the “Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art,” (2004), that conception takes place through the ear. And here it would seem to link with the parrot’s miraculous ability to speak. I have tried to transliterate the text correctly but the use of medieval Spanish diacritical marks and abbreviations have made this difficult. For example, I think it reasonable to expand ‘vgo pura’ to ‘virgo pura.’ I feel fairly confident about transcribing this much of the text:

“Ptisacus [presumably ‘psitacus’] a natura. si ave dicere valet. quare virgo pura. per ave non generaret…” 

The apparent full stops would appear to indicate line divisions into something like goliardic rhymed verse, thus,

                                                        Psitacus a natura

                                                        Si ave dicere valet

                                                        Quare virgo pura

        Per ave generaret

This can be understood in the light of the folk-belief mentioned above that impregnation can take place through the ear – and consequently as a result of being greeted. It may mean something like, “If a parrot, by nature, has the power to speak a greeting, why should not, through a greeting, a pure virgin become pregnant?” What this demonstrates is not so much that the parrot symbolises the Virgin Mary but it does show her close association with the parrot in the medieval mind.

Later on, parrots feature in religious paintings, even if not immediately associated with the Virgin. Rubens includes a parrot in a painting of the Holy Family. Both Durer and Rubens include a parrot in pictures of Adam and Eve at the Fall, when eating the apple.  Here, I think, the symbolism is different. Skelton (early C16th) refers to the parrot, in Speke, Parrot, as “a byrde of Paradyse”. Maybe Dürer’s parrot, totally unaware of what is going on, simply signifies paradise, unaware of the danger it is in. In Rubens’ picture, the parrot is looking anxiously towards the serpent, aware of the danger. It would be far-fetched to see these parrots as long-term symbols of hope, the promise of the New Adam coming through Mary. 

In general, by the time we get to the C16th and C17th, “popinjay” has come only to have its current derogatory meaning. It religious connotations seem to have been lost. For Dutch artists, parrots simply represent affluence, conspicuous consumption and trade connections with exotic places; and as time goes on, sometimes as symbols of vanity. Perhaps the Reformation, prevalent in the Low Countries, caused the Marian symbolism to be lost.

In the C19th, William Burges, follower of Pugin, was a great medievalist and collector of Dürer. Significantly, his church at Studley Royal, decorated in the chancel with a frieze of brightly coloured parrots, is dedicated to the Virgin. It is a fair guess that he had rediscovered the medieval Marian symbolism of the parrot. The same symbolic use of parrots can be found elsewhere in his work, for example in the chapel at Mount Stuart on Bute and in Cardiff Castle.

More on Parrots in Art

Still Life with Parrots:  Jan Davidz de Heem (1606 – 1684), Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Fl.

At first glance, this painting is a bourgeois celebration of abundance, from gold and silverware and  exotic fruits (some cut open ready to eat), to exotic sea shells, a boiled lobster and opened oysters – also ready to eat (a lemon and a fallen phallic pepper pot are nearby). It suggests the affluence that a Dutch merchant of the period, engaged in foreign trade, might enjoy. It also exhibits the virtuosity of the artist in portraying many different forms and textures – a virtuosity that a merchant of good taste might well want to claim as his own. But typically, such a painting is not just decoration to enjoy; it is a coded puzzle for the cognoscente  to unpick and discuss.

The most immediately striking feature of the painting is the gaudy macaw, upper left. Parrots were expensive, exotic creatures at the time, and to own one was to display one’s affluence. It is only on a second look that one notices, top centre, against the swags of black satin, and perched in a suspended ring, another parrot. It is an Africa grey, much the colour and tone of its background. Though less exotic in appearance, the Africa grey is the best talker among parrots. Only its red tail makes it stand out. It leans forward and down towards the macaw, a half-eaten apple in its beak.

The macaw looks up at it, its beak open. Is there a look of shock or fear in its eye? Or is it making ready to receive the half-eaten apple?

Paintings of this genre are often deemed to be ripe with symbolism –  I have even read one docent’s interpretation of the half-peeled lemon here, with its coil of rind falling over a table edge, (an almost universal motif in such paintings) as representing the unwinding of time! There is often something very arbitrary about the ascription of symbolic meanings in Dutch still lives. But what is clear, and not the least bit arbitrary, is the symbolic reference of the half-eaten apple.

Typically the interpretation of such paintings is along the moralising Vanitas line – all such riches are but vanity sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of inevitable death. However, there are no obvious memento mori in this painting – whereas the half-eaten apple belongs to a more certain frame of symbolic reference, the explicitly religious. On the whole, the Dutch were Protestant and not given to religious imagery, but de Heem was Catholic, living in a predominantly Catholic city, Utrecht. Maybe there wasn’t such a rejection of religious imagery among Catholics – an issue for further investigation. The parrot is a bird associated with the Garden of Eden, as in Dürer, Rubens, etc., and the half-eaten apple betokens the Fall.

Now, it would be going far too far to suggest that the talkative African grey represents a voluble Eve, brow-beating a macaw Adam to partake! We must draw a line somewhere. But in interpreting the symbolism in this painting, we need to see everything in the light (if that is the right word!) of the Fall. In this light, all the good things displayed below have a dark side, tinged by the Fall and sin. We could toy with the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride is clearly displayed in such a display, and the temptation to envy is clear. The gold and silver objects could represent avarice. The many exotic foods and the half-emptied glasses of wine suggest gluttony and the more commonplace oysters (a poor man’s protein), through their aphrodisiac properties, together with the mons-like apricots and the opened pomegranate, suggest lust.

But what of anger and sloth? Could the macaw be expressing anger? And what of that strange upright  object to the right of the golden vessel? It seems to have a shiny black handle and a tapering ginger (and not obviously metallic) blade – I cannot take it out at all. But maybe five of the Sins is sufficient for one painting! It would be exhausting to attempt to be exhaustive in interpreting this picture. There are probably many traditional symbolic meanings I am not aware of. But the thing I am certain of is the meaning of the parrot with the piece of apple, under the aegis of whose beady eye the rest of the painting is laid out for interpretation

New and Selected Poems about Painters and Paintings

Published 2018, Graft Poetry

© Nicholas Bielby

ISBN 978-1-9998878-1-0

Contents

At Kettle’s Yard                                                          

Roger van der Weyden’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ in the

National Gallery, Washington D.C.                    

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 

“Downfalling”                                                              

Cézanne Paints the Portrait of Henri Gasquet                 

“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” by

David Hockney, 1971                                      

 “The Creation”                                                            

Gwen John                                                                   

About Hopper                                                              

The Camden Town Group                                             

A Painter on Luing: Edna Whyte                                   

Rocky Neck, Gloucester, Mass.                                    

The Poppy Field                                                           

Landscape                                                                   

Richard Eurich’s Spring: New Forest, 1935                 

Zina Ogilvie on Her Husband, the Painter Malcolm Drummond, 1920                                           

On the horizon                                                              

Mary Cassatt recalls Camille Pissarro                            

Frédéric Bazille writes a letter home                              

Degas                                                                          

Notes on the poems                                                     

At Kettle’s Yard

in grateful memory of Jim Ede

After Sung Evensong at King’s, Jim said,

“Although I don’t believe a word of it,

I find it very beautiful, and a great

consolation.” I found this rather sad.

Talking over tea, after we’d been

studying a painting by Christopher Wood,

he said, “For me, it means colour.” I said,

“Yes, but, Jim, what does ‘colour’ mean?

He smiled and did not answer. What he knew

that I did not, was words are gestures out

towards an unformed meaning, not structured thought

that buttons down perception – as I tried to.

And when I left, that generous, precious man

lent me a drawing by Ben Nicholson.

*Rogier van der Weyden’s  ‘Portrait of a Lady’ in the National Gallery, Washington D.C.

The lady rests her hands upon the frame

            as though upon a ledge:

                        the picture’s edge

contains her. Other motifs do the same:

                        it is as if

                        her stiffened coif,

                        pinched hair and belt

were meant to put constraints on what she felt.

And yet, for me, this portrait represents

            something I feel central:

                        the fundamental

self-possession of her innocence.

                        Her folded hands

                        mirror the mind’s

                        composure. She

is still in an achieved serenity.

I say ‘achieved’ because her innocence

            (at least, so I suspect)

                        does not reflect

lack, or avoidance, of experience.

                        She’s turned her gaze

                        aside because

                        she’s seen and known

enough to need, thus, to reflect upon.

As I compose my thoughts, I, too, reflect,

            recalling lines that once

                        I wrote, and, since,

I have consigned to fifteen years neglect.

                        Yet it is not

                        that I forgot

                        her, since I find

she still remains a datum in my mind:

 “…you do not challenge nor compel the gaze,

            but, taking, give away

                        your mystery,

your husbandry of spirit” – so it says.

                        And even now

                        those words will do:

I find I am

in all essential matters much the same.

She brings me back to what is permanent

            within myself; and this

                        recalling is

the permanence that art should represent:

                        the quiet mind

                        that’s not resigned,

                        but which resolves,

and is composed; that brings us to ourselves.

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

Bruegel made the ploughman central:

the pattern of his lines of force

(pleats, furrows, movement) arrests us.

Icarus is incidental.

Yet what great heights he’d fallen from,

tumbling from noon to sundown down!

And now, their ardour failed, the sun

and Icarus together drown.

So be it. He is out of breath

forever, with that high kick-

ing comic gesture of a leg.

There is no dignity in death.

Why should the ploughman turn his head?

Whether folly or tragedy,

this fall is just another fall.

He has known it all already.

Indifferently to each his own

dream of heaven; to each his own

nightmare of sweating wax, falling.

He has a job still to be done.

Indifference is a defence.

With time he’s learned a callousness

to what he cannot help. So now

his husbandry of spirit is

to bend his efforts on the soil,

working with nature where he can;

by graft, not grace, trying to

remake the garden before nightfall.

“Downfalling”

      on a painting by Andrej Jackowski

Her blouse unloosed, her hands each hold a breast.

Meanwhile, he blindly flounders in the air

– what is it that these images suggest?

He’s foetal, floating, grasping and distressed.

She’s sitting pretty, four-square on a chair,

her blouse unloosed. Her hands each hold a breast.

She eyes him slyly sideways, smiles, obsessed

more with herself than anything they share.

What is it that these images suggest?

He lives a nightmare, keeps his eyes shut, lest

her self-sufficiency should strike him where,

her blouse unloosed, her hands each hold a breast.

Snowflakes, like white down falling, have possessed

his mind. Her feet are on the ground and bare.

What is it that these images suggest?

He grabs at dreams like snowflakes – though he’s guessed

(since dreams melt at the touch) that they declare

what it is these images suggest

of blouse unloosed, hands holding each a breast.

Cézanne Paints the Portrait of Henri Gasquet

Painting is so damned difficult, Henri,

I never know where I am going, what my aim

should be, with this cursed vocation of mine.

What you have is certainty – a certainty

I lack. You are exactly what you live.

I don’t know who I am. I’m a machine

for registering tones. I think I am

a painter – yes, perhaps the primitive

of a new art. I’m deeply sensual:

I love the muscle of stones, blood on the rose,

all extravagance of colours; but everything

woven together, worked into a whole.

Today we are makers of fragments – here’s

your portrait: it’s a fragment, centring

nowhere. We do not know how to compose.

I could paint for a hundred, a thousand years,

And still know nothing. I work myself to death

trying to cover fifty centimetres

of canvas, one stroke after another,

each corresponding to a breath

taken by the world; yet my canvases smell

of nothing – or only paint! As for flowers,

I’ve given them up because they wither

away so quickly. Fruit are more faithful –

they sit there, asking for forgiveness as they fade.

They smell of fields, the rain that nourished them,

the daybreaks they have seen. They stay, with all

their scents about them, even when decayed.

Men cry out, “Venus! Zeus! Apollo!” when

they can no longer truly, deeply feel

the breathing of nature in the sea’s foam,

the clouds in the sky, the strength of the sun.

But for you and me, the visible world exists –

transient, visionary, beautiful.

Yes, we are the true pagans, you and I,

Receivers of sensations, sensualists!

Into this web of earth browns, a weft of blue;

into this red, a certain green, carefully

blended, makes a mouth sad or a cheek smile.

What I have never had is a friend like you.

“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”

by David Hockney, 1971

Two figures: one of them stands

at the edge of the pool, looking down;

the other is swimming under water,

breast stroke, kicking like a frog –

each in his world. The world of air

is sharp with definitions – space

drops away from the pool’s edge,

the distances precise as saw teeth,

the man as clean as the smell of resin

rising from the forested spurs.

Under water, short-sightedly, the other

probes as tiles swim into focus, his eyes

goggle into the blur, he holds

his breath like a bomb in his chest.

He moves in a net of knotted light

flexing over his limbs, unfelt.

In a moment he will burst up into the air,

his streaming caul bursting like crystal;

and, for an instant, he will see men

like trees walking, as he drags deeply

on the air that only thinly

gushes into his branching lungs; thinly

blanches and blooms the distant hills,

the colour of unfingered plums. Meanwhile,

the watcher dances backwards with a laugh

away from the fan of water drops, his mind

still running light fingers over

and round fluid muscles, webbed limbs.

‘The Creation’

on a composite pastel  painting by David Blackburn

Dawn on a battlefield, where sluggish mud,

flicflac of light, and the zip and crackle

of lightnings flare to a touch. The apple’s

incisor-straked: brimming, it’s a slow globe

glowing faintly. This is the unwished-for

end of night, a thick sludge of algae, full

of the mad regiment of potentials,

where green flash-tracks fuse poison gas to flesh.

Is all this shot? In whining wire, tracer,

in a bursting star-shell, what eye-light broods?

Did this bring leaves to the trees, sky-blue tracked

with chalk-streaks? Within the loom of a dark

intestine, unutterable word,  it lights,

cracking wild flags of clarion colour.

Gwen John

1.  Gwen John misspells a favourite  word

Once that I know of, John applies the word

recieillé to herself; once, to recommend

it as a trait to an open-hearted friend.

“Don’t you think it beautiful?” she said.

There’s no such word, recieillé. I think she meant

recueilli: gathered in, collected, like

a harvest; to be collected. Even, to take

possession of oneself, to be present.

Always reserved, when she was younger, John,

as worshipper, model and lover of

Rodin’s, found she was alone in love.

She grew content to be herself alone –

    which is, perhaps, the content of her art,

    elusive and yet somehow intimate.

2.  Jeanne Foster writes to Quinn about modelling for John

First, she takes down my hair, combs it through,

then does it like her own. She has me sit

as she does. Then looks at me as though

not seeing me but, rather, looking at

a mirror, studying herself. I feel

the absorption of her personality,

a self-composed and gentle strength of will,

till I’m absorbed, no longer merely me.

What she paints I hardly recognise –

it seems that I, a brash American,

am someone else, with meditative eyes,

content within constraints, with what’s within.

    Is this a self whom I, perhaps, could be,

    not self-assured but self-possessed as she?

3.  John Quinn recalls Gwen John

I shall be remembered, if at all,

not for myself but those I knew – Brancusi,

Casement, running Crowley as a spy,

Conrad, defending Joyce in court – as well

as helping introduce Picasso, Braque,

the new art out of Europe, to New York.

 One thing I shall not forget: that girl –

hardly a girl – she was a woman who

painted like a woman. I say I knew

her, but who did? Those empty rooms are full

of light and absence. The girls she painted, all

are self-contained, collected, recueillies,

are all herself, unenterable. And I,

I search the stillness of her paintings still.

About Hopper

 for Ian Parks

Thanks for the Hopper poem, which I like.

    Although I don’t agree

        that ‘everything’ did ‘open out’ for him

            so clearly when he

escaped to the New England coast and skies, 

    I love your clarity,

much like a Hopper, with its level light

    defining difference.

        For me, both lighthouses and diners are

            expressions of one sense

of emptiness, of both our separateness

    and our inconsequence.

The stagey lighting of those city-scapes

    like painted flats or flies,

        unpeopled, except for solitaries who

            are masks or naked, is

a truer rhetoric than Chirico’s,

    evoking absences.

The lighthouse gleams with self-sufficiency,

    a world indifferent

        to us, to human needs, desires and hopes.

            Perhaps, in fact, you meant

something of this, calling the lighthouse ‘shuttered’.

    Whether the light is slant,

full flood or dawn or dusk, his windows, like

    those ‘windows of the soul’,

        the eyes of those he paints, are shuttered, blind,

            blank black: each a black hole —

except one image in an etching, where

    beside the window, a girl

kneels naked on a bed and, looking up, looks out —

    and we look outwards too —

        where the wind blows the curtain inwards, and light

            floods over her. Placed so,

we see her fall of hair stirred by the air

    and not her eyes, but know

she’s stirred by still unformed desires and needs,

    a sense of life that is

        vulnerable, and makes her vulnerable.

            I think what Hopper sees

is a tragic world become too easily

     inured to tragedies.

The Camden Town Group

1. Jacques-Émile Blanche describes his friend, Walter Sickert

I’d have to say he has a heart of stone,

but is as fascinating as he finds

himself. Like every great man, saint or man

of genius, he sacrifices friends,

lovers, family and, mostly, wives

to his vocation. He’s a selfish brute,

it’s true, yet he enriches all our lives

by who he is, his friendship and his art.

He needs us since he needs an audience

and does not know, or else he does not rate,

the damage that he does. He has no sense

others might live for other things than art.

We, who’ve learnt to love him at arm’s length,

relish the man, are nourished by his strength. 

2. Gilman replies to Mrs Pissarro, concerning Spencer Gore

Dear Mrs Pissarro, Thank you so much

for the kind letter of sympathy at this

terrible loss. He was so generous,

so unselfish. I can feel glad for such

people as you who can realise that

his personality will live on in

his paintings, in his inspiration,

although, myself, I cannot feel this yet.

He was such a wonderful character.

The hardness that he showed himself, he never

showed to others. We can be sure, whatever

the future may now hold for us, or for

our countrymen, without him we will feel

but half ourselves, without his gift to heal.

3. Harold Gilman recalls Spencer Gore’s theory of art

“What we must find in any scene is what

we might call its essential character.

Things are more interesting as they are,

or, if you like, because they are so. That

is the subject to paint. Life, or Nature, with

its quiddities, commands our reverence,

and thus, emotional significance.

Art is character – Nature’s, ours: both.”

From all his gifts, single-mindedly

he chose this one way. Selflessly profligate,

he spent his life for his own, and others’, art,

and died too soon – unnecessarily,

but typically, catching pneumonia when

out working at his easel in the rain.

4. Lucien Pissarro, who represented Camille Pissarro’s ideas to the Group

I am a man of small ambitions – which suits

my talents well. With no side quite my own,

I am content with what I’ve always known –

poor dear old father’s gift palely dilutes

in me, my personality, and in

my paintings, too. His brilliance was too strong

for me in France, so I came here, for long

evenings, a lesser light. And for my kin,

my Esther, whom I first met as a child

and who has been my confidante and love

in all the struggles I have had to prove

worthy of the ideals father instilled.

I like to find a place, between trees,

to work where I’m not too conspicuous.

5. Charles Ginner’s mistress

I know he holds me in contempt – but not

of me; rather, of what he needs me for.

He is a gentleman and, as my visitor,

shows a considerateness that falls well short

of love. When with his friends, he spins a line:

he likes to liken what he needs of me

to daily gargling with TCP,

or to his evening bottle of red wine.

I know his jokes and all the fear and pain

the jokes protect him from – the woman whom

he lost who lost her way; the pending doom

if he should catch pneumonia again.

I’m not his love. His sister, Ruby, is,

and then the children he supports, not his.

6. Harold Gilman, talks about his neighbour, Walter Sickert

Sickert? I’ve not seen much of him of late.

Though I admire him, I must do otherwise.

Not for me, his muddy colours! Yet his

dark tones are richer than en plein air light.

I like to use those darker tones but work

in purer colour – not raw, straight from the tube,

but deep and clear, so juxtaposed they throb,

like light reflected in a shaded brook.

Sickert paints with spontaneity –

he loads his brush, one touch and happy chance

discharges it like electricity –

while every mark I make is measured, thought

carefully about. My colours dance

within a geometry that I have wrought.

A Painter on Luing: Edna Whyte

‘There is only one fault: incapacity to feed on light.’

  – Simone Weil

She looks into the heart of light, always

not contre jour exactly, but occident;

concentric on the sun, each dab of paint,

tangential to sky, sea and landscape, is

just as it is not for depiction but

suggestion  – of the play of light on what

it lights upon, the sun its hidden source.

The God she denies does not care if we

believe or not, but only cares about

our making ourselves. The God she does not

believe in is what she paints religiously,

light that transforms, transfigures, that lights

a fire here, now, in earth’s hearth, heart’s

fire that figures unapproachable day.

Rocky Neck, Gloucester, Mass.

This place was called the Artists’ Colony.

By Wonson Cove, John Twatchman sat

at sunset on the porch discussing art

with Mary Cassatt when she came to stay.

East Point, across Smith’s Cove, the Eliots

had their summer home and, west, across

the Harbor at the Fort, Charles Olson’s house

looks out to Ten Pound Island and the yachts.

Metcalf, Hassam and Duveneck, Kuehne, Noyes, 

all painted Rocky Neck from Banner Hill.

Homer and Hopper both worked here as well.

And there’s the Highways Depot – that’s the place

Virginia Lee Burton came to show

her son the real-life Katy, dreaming snow.

The Poppy Field

The meadow seethes with seeding grasses,

A bronze-bloom fuming off the green,

And thickly scattered scarlet poppies

Flame and flicker in between.

Where, down the bank the poppies spatter,

A faint track slants, knee-deep in grass

Along it stroll a child and mother,

Caught at two instants as they pass.

The small boy in the foreground’s clasping

A sheaf of poppies to his heart,

The moment’s scarlet silks unwilting

Only in the field of art.

Landscape

is art’s enquiry of itself – its forms

Are transformations, where, composed within

A syntax, each asymmetry confirms

Its poise. The text and flexion of a line

Is scribed or scored in order to define

A contour or enclosure on a ground

Plush to the touch: lushness within a bound.

It is an abstract of the mind, and frames

Ideal configurations, catching at

The moment when the mind, before it names

Its knowledge, knows itself in knowing that

The forms it sees and seizes on repeat

A shadowed land within. And what’s disclosed

In composition is a mind composed.

Landscape expands beyond the picture frame,

Beyond the taxing of the eye and what

It actively is able to reform.

What it confers is innocence of vision, not

Of an imagined world of shadows, but

The world imagined, the real made real, sense

Transfigured on a ground of accidents.

      For David Blackburn, 1986

Richard Eurich’s “Spring: New Forest, 1935” 

It is a child’s vision of Spring,

Almost like a primitive –

A doll’s house among the trees, a caravan,

A pony like a nursery toy, its mane

Tufted and brush-like, the modelling

More wood-block-solid than the thing it’s of.

And yet the painting’s subtle. Fresh

And variegated greens, all toned

With earth colours, as the earth brings forth,

Variously, in orchard, forest, heath,

Fruit-blossom, fir, the bronze of furze

Speckled with sulphur, blaze and blend.

And everywhere it’s textured – rich

In touch and stroke, the surface is

All pattern, colour – terra cottas, greens,

Ochres and sand; the vegetables’ plotted lines,

Split palings, plank and spoke hard edge

What fuss and fume of vegetation fuse.

It is a human landscape that

Presents a pattern in disorder,

The accident in order; where we find

The luxury of nature disciplined

To human purposes, and art,

As figured in the pony and the rider.

The poplar-pillar sentinels

Along the wall; the solid house

Hazed by the spray of foliage; and then,

On a cleared patch, Vivien’s caravan,

Slab-sided box on yellow wheels;

The temporary fence; primeval trees;

Knee-deep in grass, two women who,

Perhaps, are gathering herbs or flowers;

The rider in his brick-red shirt, who turns,

Hand resting on the pony’s haunch, and scans

The way he’s come, pausing as though

To check some memory or plan he has –

It’s not a scene as seen, but as

Imagination lets us make,

From natural overgrowth and boundary,

A rich vision, however childishly,

Of human possibilities,

Sustained astride the Forest pony’s back.

Zina Ogilvie on her husband, the painter Malcolm Drummond, 1920

After the War, I thought he’d never paint

again – although he’d not fought at the Front

but was entrenched in Whitehall. It was that

that troubled him, the helpless guilt of it.

He was depressed, though not as damaged as

most soldiers were.

      What restored him was

the most unlikely thing. He found a bad

review from well before the War that said

his blatant London subjects… irritate

by the empty glare of their gaudy tints. “You wait,”

he said, “and see.”

                              His tones are deeper now,

the paintings understated, yet they show

the same bold planes of colour, patternings.

But what I think is different are the things

he paints – it’s London indoors now, not

comfortable with itself, with people that

hardly relate like people – the scrolled wigs

of barristers in court; or men with fags

in Chelsea Public Library, standing

reading the newspapers; women bending

over tables, wrapped in themselves, in coats

and hats, reading magazines, drained to its

drab colours and isolating silence.

And in the Hammersmith Palais de Danse,

couples gaze past each other under the dim

lanterns hanging down above a brown gloom.

      We live together but he’s still alone

       in no-man’s-land, waiting to come in.

On the horizon

on a painting of my three granddaughters

Three sisters facing out to sea,

static momentarily,

gazing at three ships in line

standing off the River Tyne.

What cargoes will the sea bring home,

what specie in the tumbling foam?

A teenager, see Jessie stand,

with legs crossed like an ampersand.

Her mobile in her hands, she seems

part bored, part lost in distant dreams.

Next, Bella, barefoot and bobbed-blonde,

has stopped mid-pace, surprised, half-turned

as if the prospect had defined

something still forming in her mind.

Last, Alexandra, stolidly

stands four-square on; studies the sea,

twisting the pockets of her shorts

as if it’s troubling her thoughts.

What gifts and griefs will fall and foam,

will time and tide bring tumbling home?

Mary Cassatt recalls Camille Pissarro

He could teach a stone to draw. We all

learnt so much from him, both how to see

and how to live. A man of principle,

he lived his vision of what art could be.

Everybody felt it – that wild man

Cézanne thought of him as a father – even

“un peu comme le bon Dieu” – almost divine!

His long white beard, I thought, was simply heaven!

He’d had a hard time of it, coming home

after the war, to find the Prussians had

ripped out some fifteen hundred paintings from

their stretchers, burnt the wood in winter, laid

the canvases to tread on – they’d made the place

a slaughterhouse – and when they’d fouled each canvas,

flung it on the dung hill. His answer was?

To paint, and to become yet more prodigious.

At one point, broke, both he and Guillaum were

reduced to painting shop fronts. He studied light

in Constable and Turner, though not finding their

analysis of shadows adequate.

He worked at different ways to represent

the life of light on things. His conscience

visuelle, beyond all theories, meant

he showed how art has moral consequence.

And yet it was Degas who changed my life.

It was his pastel drawings showed me art

as I want to see it. It was as if

mes deux maîtres were my day and night.

Though now I’m old, blind and tetchy, like

Gauguin, “Je ne le renie pas.” Can I 

disown all that I owe? He helped to make

the human in the artist that is me.

Frédéric Bazille writes a letter home

I’ve now moved into my atelier

with Monet. The light here in Paris

and in the North is washed with rain and is

forever changing. At home in Montpellier

the light is not like this. Our southern sun

defines the object – hard-edged shadows carve

each motif out. But here all objects have

a softness the shifting light plays softly on.

Monet is quite good at landscapes and his

advice has helped me very much. He exacts

the trembling moment, fugitive effects

where light is the motif, not entities.

I try to see things with his eyes, and yet

I like the effects of light that strengthen form

so objects can emerge and stake their claim –

like chiaroscuro, when motifs are lit.

Yet Monet is great company. I learn from him

even when I must to do differently.

Scrape off, begin again, I hear him say.

He will paint north, I south, each to our home.

I’m making progress and that’s all – it’s all 

I want. Monet’s single-mindedness

will drive him, one day, to achieve success.

I’ll merely be a footnote to his tale.

Degas

 “… Two centuries ago, I would have been painting ‘Susannah

Bathing’, now I just paint ‘Women in a tub.’”

No art was ever less spontaneous

than mine. What I do is the result of

reflection, the study – and my love –

of the great masters. Now, as my eyes

become weaker, I have to heighten colour –

amber-rose with arsenic, gold-orange

with lobelia –  to find a strange

equivalence for limber flesh and squalor.

Ugly, awkward, contorted, true, my girls

strain and deport themselves as work and life

and art require them to – it is as if

they had no life but that of animals

transcended in their dance, those uncouth poses

in pastel velvet of blown roses, roses.

Notes on poems

Many of the poems here have been selected from the following publications: An Invitation to Supper, Outposts, 1978; Remember Wyatt, Fighting Cock Press, 1999; Crooked Smoke, Graft Poetry, 2011; and The Naming of Things, Poetry Salzburg, 2015.

Images of most of the pictures referred to are easily found online. For British artists, pictures in galleries in the UK can be found on www.artuk.org. Certain more recherché references are given in the notes below.

p5    Jim Ede, a former Deputy Director of the Tate, held open house to undergraduates interested in art, in his home at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and he lent them paintings and drawings. Thus, at various times, I had pictures by Ben Nicholson, Christopher Wood and Alfred Wallis on the walls of my digs. When he died, Jim Ede left Kettle’s Yard to the University.

p7    This painting in Washington D.C. is not to be confused with one of the same name in the National Gallery, London. See Wikipedia, ‘Portrait of a Lady (van der Weyden)’

p8     This is the picture referred to in Auden’s Musée des Beaux Art.  See Wikipedia ‘ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’

p9     This poem is based on Joachim Gasquet’s account of Cézanne’s monologue while painting Henri Gasquet, his old school friend. Joachim, whose portrait by Cézanne is much better known, was Henri’s son. Joachim was inclined to embellish his accounts of Cézanne’s conversations, making them sound more ‘literary.’ See Wikiart.Org/en/paul-cezanne.henry-gasquet-1897.

p11    See Artuk.org/Jackowski. Scroll down to find the image.

p12   Googling the poem title will bring up many sites, e.g., www.arthive.com/artists/4449-David_Hockney html

p15    Composite pastel drawings by David Blackburn, an old school friend of mine, can be found online. But as far as I can ascertain, ‘The Creation’ is not among them.

p16   The first two poems here are based on existing letters. In the first, the friend to whom GJ was writing was JF. In other letters, GJ spells the word correctly! I have not been able to find an image of the portrait of the poet, Jeanne Robert Foster. JQ is thought to have been, at some time, the lover of each of them.

p18    Edward Hopper is easily found online.

p20    Prior to the First World War, the Allied Artists Association was a co-operative where artists (‘shareholders’ was Sickert’s term) constituted the governing committee by rotation in alphabetical order. Hence Gilman, Ginner and Gore came together. They bonded and formed the basis of the Camden Town Group, under the influence of Walter Sickert. The second sonnet is based very closely on an actual letter and the quotation in the third is hardly edited or amended at all.

p26    The reference here is to the well-known painting by Monet. Its ‘double-exposure’ effect is not so widely recognised.

p27   On looking at pastel landscape abstracts by David Blackburn. See also note to p15.

p28    Richard Eurich RA, the War Artist,  was a family friend. The caravan, in which I have stayed, belonged to another family friend, Vivien Cutting. See cover.

p32    Malcolm Drummond was a member of the Camden Town Group. See Note to p20; also artuk.org/drummond-malcolm

Painting “Beach Scene with Boats” (oil) attributed to Sir Augustus Wall Callcott RA , 1779 – 1844

I bought this painting at auction from Phillips in Leeds in 1996. The attribution to Callcott was presumably based on the pencil inscription on the back of the board, saying (sic) ‘Sir Agustus Calcott,’ in rather shaky (C19th?) handwriting Additionally, there were three self-adhesive paper labels, in apparent age order, saying, (1) N1330 Sir Augustus Callcott OSM (or H?); (2) N1330 Callcott OSH; and (3) N1330 Augustus Wall Callcott RA OSE. These labels may simply have been clarifying the pencil inscription. A further label says ‘£500 me’ (substantially more than I paid!). There is no decipherable signature on the painting itself even under UV light. Though, in the lower left corner, I sometimes think I can see a very faint ghost of a signature, maybe beginning with an initial A and then R. But this is perhaps wishful seeing! I need to try infra-red light.

The painting is on an 8” x 10” board, with a quarter inch overlap all round. It is a very competent little marine painting from the first half of the C19th, and.it still pleases me. Centrally, a group of fishing boats, with sails still raised or only half lowered, are beached with some low rocks and wooden posts nearby. Five fishermen are working on the boats or beside them. The colours are largely pinkish ochres and umbers, with the odd dash of red in a fisherman’s cap or clothing. To the right, a white sail, heeling over, can be seen on a distant strip of sea; and to the right, in the background, a grass-capped low cliff rises up. The rendering of the light and aerial perspective on the low cliff shows the naturalism that developed in the early C19th, especially evidenced in Constable.

Biographical and critical notes on Callcott: 

Callcott was born in London where his father was a builder. Four year younger than Turner, he also had a working class background but established himself through talent. He became an ARA in 1806 (aged 27), and an RA in 1810. He became very successful both in society and as a painter. Later, he was appointed Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and was knighted 1837. He was both a friend and a competitor of Turner’s. In his time, this competition was more noteworthy that Turner’s with the less highly regarded Constable.

In 1827, he married Maria (daughter of Admiral Dundas, widow of Captain Graham), then travelled abroad briefly (1827-8). He was said to have had ‘an inestimable private character.’ Sydney Smith called him ‘Sea Shore Callcott’ and said his aerial perspective was ‘exquisitely rendered’.  In 1829 the London Magazine said of Constable, ‘What a contrast to Callcott!’ Callcott clearly set some sort of a standard. In 1832 it was said he ‘surpassed all others in his branch. Turner should look to him as a model.’ He was referred to as ‘an English Claude’ whose art was of a ‘serene simplicity.’ The influence of Cuyp has also been suggested. In 1856 The Art Journal said he ‘painted with a silver pencil’ and he was commended for his ‘pure and delicate colouring’. But Ruskin damned him with faint praise – ‘he painted everything tolerably and nothing excellently.’ His earlier pictures had a warm colouring but his later ones were cooler, “rather too uniformly cool – almost insipid.” In 1923, Baker and James in British Painting (Medici 1923) refer to his ‘mediocre content’ and call him ‘commonplace’. But in his time he was held in high regard as an artist and in even higher regard as a person.

The board

The painting is on a board that has a stencilled paper label on the back saying C. BARBE, 60 REGENT’S QUADRANT, LONDON. This label would seem, from information online, to date the board to between 1827 and 1837.

The website Npg British Arts Suppliers 1650-1950, updated Dec 2020 (qv), cites the use of the names C. Barbe (1827-37), Camille Barbe (1832-43) and Charles Barbe (1835-48) before the name changed to Lechertier Barbe (1848 onwards) when it supplied, e.g., Ford Maddox Brown and Whistler. Regent’s Quadrant was very newly built and very fashionable in 1827.  The Barbe company was also known as musical instrument makers till 1844. The family also had premises in Paris at 17 rue Beranger and were known as brush makers. By 1833 they were brush importers in London and colourmen by 1844. In Paris, the Barbe and Lechertier families were both brush makers and were linked by marriage. C. Barbe published an artists’ supplies catalogue in 1834 which (s)he sent to Sir John Soane. (It is not clear whether the ‘C’ stood for ‘Camille’ or ‘Charles’ at this point in time.)

Expert opinions

Two experts (one from Antiques Roadshow) have doubted it is by Callcott. Certainly, it doesn’t look like any Callcott I have seen – it is less stylised, less influenced by the golden Claude tradition. The names Knell and Carmichael have been mentioned:

William Adophus Knell, 1801(or 2) -1875, was born on the Isle of Wight and lived in London. He did small paintings on panel among other things (as did his son, Adophus Knell). His dates and location would seem to fit. Red-capped fishermen feature in some paintings – but many artists included red-capped fisherman, either because many fishermen wore them or because a red high-light suited the composition. The paintings I’ve seen look a bit more artificial than ours.

William Calcott Knell, 1830 – 80, son of the above, does not fit well for dates unless he was using old boards from his father.

James John Wilson Carmichael, 1799 – 1868, was Newcastle-born and only moved to London 1846, so is not likely to have bought the board at the right period (1827-37).

There will be many other marine genre painters of the same period, a time when there was a move from somewhat stylised renditions of the sea to somewhat more naturalistic, atmospheric renderings as this one is. This change can be observed in all three artists mentioned above.

Another person I have looked at is Edward William Cooke, RA, FRS, FGS, FZS, etc , 1811-1880, who was born in London and who, it is known, bought a bladder of colour from Barbe in 1844 in preparation for his first Venetian trip. He was a precocious engraver at 18 and began oil painting in 1833. He was amazingly talented in all directions – in art, geology, zoology and science generally. He loved C17th Dutch marine painters and himself painted mainly marine subjects, but very variously, enjoying both calm and more dramatic scenes. Sometimes he seems very modern, and he usually painted in high definition. Some Isle of Wight shore scenes are a bit like our painting. I wish he could be our painter but it seems unlikely!

In a desultory way, this is still an on-going investigation.