Renaissance Drawing: Inspiration Needs Preparation

The head of a youth, attributed to Pietro Faccini, c.1590 King's Gallery

I recently attended a fascinating exhibition of Renaissance drawing. (‘Drawing the Italian Renaissance’ is at The King’s Gallery, London until 9 March.)

Drawing became widespread in Italy in the 1400s, as the cost of paper fell and as new materials like chalk became available. It was the basis for artistic study, a fundamental of preparatory practice and a means of exploring ideas. 

The exhibition features 160 drawings - by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and many others. There are tender portraits of unknown sitters; fearsome sketches of imaginary grotesques; precise explorations of costume and drapery; of character, posture and attitude. There are designs for small devotional images, altarpieces and wall paintings; allegories and scenes from ancient myths. We can see Leonardo’s studies of horses, Parmigianino’s dogs and Titian’s ostrich. Here’s Michelangelo’s black chalk drawing of The Risen Christ, reaching in exultation to the sky; and Raphael’s sensitive sketch of one naked woman in three poses - preparation for a fresco of the Three Graces. He was one of the few Renaissance artists to work from female models.

We can also inspect large drawings known as cartoons (from the Italian ‘cartone’, meaning ‘large sheet of paper’), final designs to be transferred to an altarpiece or wall. This was done by pricking outlines and rubbing powdered charcoal or dust across the back of the sheet; or by working with a squared grid to enable further enlargement. Cartoons are particularly precious because they were made with poor quality paper and often discarded after use.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Studies of a horse, c 1490
ROYAL COLLECTION ENTERPRISES LIMITED 2024/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

I was very much taken with Leonardo’s restless, curious mind. He sketched to develop his ideas on anatomy, botany, water and avian flight. He drafted a bird’s eye view of western Tuscany; a bear’s foot; a dog captaining a sailing boat with an oak tree for a mast. He drew human and animal dissections; filled pages with sketches of vivacious domestic cats, caged lions and sinister dragons. He was constantly looking to understand the physical world, drawing for pleasure as well as for research.

We learn that early paper was made from shredded clothing rags (linen and hemp). Artists could work in metalpoint, employing a lead or silver stylus. They could draw with black, red or white chalk, cut into small pieces and wedged into the end of a split stick – sharpening the chalk to a point for fine lines. Or they could employ charcoal (carbonised wood), less precise but more durable, soaking sticks in linseed oil to produce a richer colour. There was also black ink, applied with goose feather quills or a fine brush of squirrel hair. 

Bernardino Campi, The Virgin and Child (c.1570-80), which is in the exhibition at The King’s Gallery
CREDIT: © ROYAL COLLECTION ENTERPRISES LIMITED 2024/ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST

Shortly before his death in 1564, at the age of 88, Michelangelo ordered that many of his drawings be destroyed in two bonfires. Writing a few years after, the biographer Giorgio Vasari explained that the artist didn't want people to see the labour that had gone into his art. 

We may recognise this instinct in contemporary creative professions – the desire to suggest that inspiration is effortless and instinctive; that ideas arrive magically, fully formed.

But experienced heads know that success derives from exploration and experimentation; from trial and error; from drafting, planning and plotting; from hours of deep thought and hard work.

Inspiration needs preparation.

'Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it.’
Louis Pasteur

Head of a Cleric c. 1448
Metalpoint on prepared ochre surface, heightened with white, 189 x 173 mm. Royal Library, Windsor

Of course, once we’re properly primed and rigorously rehearsed, we can afford to be more cavalier in our execution. One drawing by Paolo Farinati is inscribed with instructions. The figures, when transferred to the walls of the patron’s villa, should be roughly 3 feet high, but ‘You may do as you fancy when you are on the scaffolding.’

'I been reading my old journals,
Checking to see where my head has been.
And I been apologizing to some people,
Some bridges I needed to mend.
And I been eating more greens,
Getting my body out the line.
I'm gonna be super fine.
And I been letting some old ideas go.
I'm making room for my life to grow.
I just wanna be prepared.
I just wanna be prepared.
Getting myself ready
For what's comin' for me.
I just wanna be prepared.’

Jill Scott, ‘Prepared’ (A Harris / D Farris / J Scott)

No. 505

The Satirical Perspective of Tirzah Garwood: ‘Blessed Be the Eyes that See the Things that Ye See.’

Tirzah Garwood - The Crocodile

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the art of Tirzah Garwood. (The Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 26 May)
 
Garwood was a wood-engraver, paper marbler and painter, who approached her work with a sharp mind, a sensitive touch and a satirical eye. She prompts us to see the amusing, absurd and uncanny in the detail of everyday life.
 
Eileen Lucy Garwood was born into a military family in Gillingham in 1908. She acquired the nickname Tirzah as a corruption of Tertia, Latin for ‘third child’. Having grown up in the various towns of southern England where her father was posted, she studied at the Eastbourne School of Art. There she was taught wood-engraving by Eric Ravilious, whom she married in 1930. 
 
Garwood’s engravings were imaginatively conceived and precisely executed. They abounded in wry observations and witty juxtapositions. 
 
Here’s a young Garwood on a trip to Kensington High Street with her formidable aunt. The shoppers, wrapped up against the cold, pass comically posed mannequins in summer fashions. Back at home, in her comfortable dressing gown and slippers, an older Garwood stretches and yawns extravagantly, as her contented dog sleeps at her feet. Here a cloche-hatted Garwood, in a neat pussy-bow blouse, sits in a third-class railway compartment. She clutches her purse to her lap, wide awake and alert, as the two suited men opposite take a snooze. Meanwhile her bald, moustachioed father, concentrates on composing a letter at his desk, closely observed by a flat-capped window cleaner. And Ravilious stands enigmatically in the garden, in a trench coat and fedora, a marrow under each arm.
 
Garwood’s conservative parents were suspicious of working-class Ravilious and the influence he was having on their daughter. 

[My parents] ‘thought my subjects hideous, and that Mr Ravilious was perverting a nice girl who used to draw fairies and flowers into a stranger who rounded on them and did drawings that were only too clearly caricatures of themselves.’

Tirzah Garwood - The Train Journey 1929. Wood engraving. Private collection

Garwood’s theme was not just her family. More broadly it was mid-century English society. She shows us the domestic rituals, the complex relationships, the contours of class and gender. 
 
As a group of uniformed schoolgirls marches along the street in a crocodile, one pupil gives an affectionate pat to an attentive black terrier. Formally dressed partygoers conduct a séance, concentrating intensely as they reach out their hands in the dark. A lady marvels at her distorted reflection in the Hall of Mirrors. A young woman chats to her sister as she bathes. And granny plays an ace at the card table.
 
Garwood’s gaze is always acute, amused, affectionate. 
 
Garwood and Ravilious set up home in rural Essex, where they had three children.
Increasingly, her time was taken up with childcare and domestic tasks. Her art took a back seat.
 
‘I always regret that I stopped working because it is difficult with a house to think about.’

Tirzah, 1950, Photograph by Edwin Smith. Private Collection

Nonetheless, Garwood still found time to take up paper marbling for lampshades and books. This involved dropping blobs of thinned oil paint onto a ‘bath’ of gum-thickened water, and then teasing patterns from it with a stylus. Her nature-inspired designs were fragile, complex, harmonious, and became popular with London interiors shops.
 
‘Marbling gave me pleasure because I felt no-one else could do this.’
 
Garwood clearly had a restlessly creative mind. At the exhibition you can see a scrapbook filled with her fantastical cuttings and illustrations. There’s also a patchwork quilt, a design for a children’s counting book, a series of ‘portraits’ of local village houses, and some charming ink sketches - including one of a melancholy snow woman in the back garden. She effortlessly crossed the divide between art, craft and design.
 

Tirzah Garwood - Window Cleaner c.1927, pen, ink & watercolour. Private collection

While still in her thirties, Garwood suffered a double blow. In 1941 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had emergency mastectomy surgery. The following year, while Ravilious was serving as a war artist, his plane went missing off Iceland. His body was never recovered. 
 
Garwood later wrote that she endured ‘spasms of dreadful sorrow because Eric wasn’t there to share some joke, or some odd occurrence… and worst of all, to appreciate the children.’
 
Two years after her husband’s death, Garwood began painting in oils. She developed a style that was both sophisticated and naïve. A seemingly innocent world of toys, animals, flowers and insects is haunted by anxiety. A kitten looms over a toy castle by a row of black pansies. A goose in a field rears up as she senses a threat to her goslings. Seen from above, a group of children play hide and seek in a garden in deep shadow.
 
In 1948 Garwood was again diagnosed with cancer, and, with no hope of recovery, she was subsequently admitted to a nursing home. Often in pain from her therapy, she nonetheless completed some twenty small oil paintings. She described her last year as the happiest of her life. 
 
Tirzah Garwood died in 1951 and was buried in Copford. Her gravestone reads:
 
‘Blessed be the eyes that see the things that ye see.’
Luke 10:23
 

'Each little day is a world of its own,
Each little day is a tomb. 
Whenever the day has drifted away, 
It's back to the womb .
As I lie alone in the darkness, 
Waiting the next rebirth, 
I say for me what could very well be 
For everyone else on earth. 
Could be the first day of the best of my life. 
There could be sunlight, there could be rain. 
But losing or winning, this is beginning all over again.
This is the birthday of a brand new start,
Change of direction, change of heart.
When I think of today, I feel tempted to say, 
Destiny, do your worst. 
Of the rest of the days of the rest of my life, 
This is only the first.’
Molly Drake, 'The First Day'

No. 504

Late People Lose

Norman Rockwell - Girl Running With Wet Canvas

'One good thing about punctuality is that it's a sure way to help you enjoy a few minutes of privacy.'
Orlando Aloysius Battista

We were coming from another appointment. We were making some final changes. We were waiting for the boards to be mounted. We were running just a few minutes late… But then we missed the train and missed the plane and missed the meeting. And so we lost the client’s confidence, lost the pitch and lost the anticipated revenue. We were denied the celebration, the bonus and the promotion. And we fumbled the opportunity to make some great work.

All because we were just a few minutes late. 

'A Man consumes the Time you make him Wait In thinking of your Faults - so don't be late!’
Arthur Guiterman

I read recently in the Guardian (Hannah Devlin, 10 Nov 2024) about research into tardiness in business. The study, published in the journal ‘Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes’, surveyed thousands of executives in the US and the UK. Participants were asked to rate pieces of work, such as proposals, product pitches, advertising and news articles. But first, they were told that the work was submitted either early, on time or late.

Even though respondents were looking at the same stimulus, work introduced as ‘late’ was consistently rated as worse in quality than material presented as ‘early’ or ‘on time.’ Moreover, a perceived missed deadline prompted evaluators to believe an employee had less integrity, and made them less willing to collaborate with that person in the future.

‘Everyone saw the exact same [material], but they couldn’t help but use their knowledge of when it came in to guide their evaluation of how good it was.’
Prof Sam Maglio, the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management (who co-authored the study with David Fang of Stanford University)

In the face of substantial work challenges, we may be inclined to procrastinate and delay; to plan optimistically rather than realistically; to hesitate and leave things to the last minute. We may plead for more time, for deadlines to be delayed, while we make the finishing touches, while we journey from good to great. We may convince ourselves that a superior end-product will justify the inconvenience and irritation.

But we would be wrong.

Punctuality may seem rather a modest professional virtue. But its absence leads to all manner of practical problems and negative perceptions. Tardiness taints relationships. It corrodes trust. And so, in the end, late people lose.

'It gets late early out there.’
Yogi Berra

'Stayed in bed all morning just to pass the time.
There's something wrong here, there can be no denying.
One of us is changing,
Or maybe we just stopped trying.
And it's too late, baby, now it's too late,
Though we really did try to make it.
Something inside has died,
And I can't hide and I just can't fake it.’

Carole King, ‘It’s Too Late’ (C King, Toni Stern)

No. 503

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: The Motivational Power of Rivalry and Respect

Rubens, copy of The Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo. The Battle of Anghiari, 1603

I recently visited a fine exhibition considering the artistic environment in Florence around 1504, when Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael were all working in the city. (‘Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael’ is at The Royal Academy, London until 16 February.)

The show illustrates how competition and rivalry, allied to a willingness to learn, can spur creative people on to achieve great things.

Leonardo, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant girl, was born in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence. A painter, engineer, scientist and philosopher, he worked for a time in Milan, where he created The Last Supper. In 1504, back in Florence, he was 52 and applying himself to his portrait of Lisa del Gioncondo, the ‘Mona Lisa.’ 

Sebastiano da Sangallo, copy of a section of The Battle of Cascina by Michelangelo - c. 1542. Oil on wood, 77 x 130 cm. Holkham Hall, Norfolk

Michelangelo came from a reputable Florentine banking family. He preferred to work as a sculptor and had carved the Pietà in Rome. In 1504, the 29-year-old had just completed his 17-foot-high marble statue of the biblical warrior king David, a commission from the Florentine state.

Leonardo and Michelangelo were quite different characters. Leonardo was sociable and outgoing. Michelangelo was grumpy and truculent. (He had smashed his nose in a fight with another sculptor.)

There was clearly no love lost between them. Michelangelo taunted Leonardo for his failure to finish the huge bronze equine statue assigned by Duke Ludovico of Milan. (Ludovico ended up giving the bronze away to forge cannons.) Leonardo, in turn, described Michelangelo’s representation of muscles as like ‘bags of walnuts.’ Invited, along with other artists, to advise the Florentine authorities on the appropriate location for David, Leonardo suggested an inconspicuous place at the back of the Loggia della Signoria – and that its genitals should be covered. 

Perhaps with an eye on exploiting the great artists’ rivalry, the Florentine government commissioned first Leonardo and then Michelangelo to create murals glorifying the republic in the newly constructed council hall of the Palazzo della Signoria. (The contract was witnessed by Nicolo Machiavelli, the council secretary.) Leonardo was allocated the Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo the Battle of Cascina.

At the exhibition, we can examine their preparatory drawings, in the original and in later copies. 

Michelangelo -Taddei Tondo  c. 1504–05 Carrara marble. Royal Academy, London

Sketching in red chalk and brown ink, Leonardo presents snarling cavalrymen on rearing horses. Swords fly, bodies writhe, soldiers tumble under foot. We are in the brutal heart of the hostility.
 
Michelangelo sets a completely different tone. The Florentine army has been resting, swimming in the Arno, when the Pisans attack. We see naked soldiers clambering out of the river, scrambling over rocks, looking over their shoulders, dragging their clothes onto damp limbs. The urgency is palpable.
 
The contrast in the approaches of the two great artists is striking. Leonardo is interested in the bestial face of war, contorted and grimacing. Michelangelo concerns himself with human contours, muscle and skin, the eroticism of the heroic body.
 
Late in 1504 Raphael arrived on the scene. The son of a court artist, he had been raised and trained in Urbino, and was renowned for his charm, a quality that came in useful when dealing with clients. He was in his early 20s and eager to ‘spend some time in Florence to learn.’

Raphael -The Bridgewater Madonna c.1507. Originally on oil and wood, but later transferred to canvasae

We can observe Raphael’s appetite for study. He drew Michelangelo’s David, making the hands smaller than they appear on the statue. He sketched Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan, and borrowed a pleasing detail from the work in his painting of Saint Catherine, pushing her left leg before her right. 
 
Raphael also copied Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, the ‘Taddei Tondo.’ In this marble relief (the only Michelangelo marble held in Britain) the infant John the Baptist presents the baby Jesus with a flapping goldfinch - a symbol of the Passion. Christ flinches, but also looks back at the bird, accepting his fate. When preparing for his own painting of the Virgin and Child, the ‘Bridgewater Madonna’, Raphael sketched a series of restless, twisting infants that were clearly inspired by the ‘Taddei Tondo.’
 
Raphael teaches us that, when we are young, we should study the greats, learn from our elders, analyse their technique and adapt it in our own work. Leonardo and Michelangelo teach us that, as we mature, we should embrace conflict and creative rivalry; measure ourselves against the best - because competition pushes us to be confident in our own distinctiveness.
 
In the event, neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo finished the frescos for the Palazzo della Signoria. Michelangelo was recalled to Rome by the Pope, Leonardo returned to Milan, and the fragile Florentine republic fell to the returning Medici. Sometimes life gets in the way.

'I used to worry because another fella
Tried to steal my girl away.
I used to toss and turn
All through the night,
The thought of it kept me awake.
Every time she walked by him,
She was all in his eye.
She set him straight, she told him
I had to be her only guy.
That's why I said:
Competition ain't nothing, y’all,
If you got a love that's true.
Competition ain't nothing, boy,
They just keep on loving you.’
Little Carl Carlton, 'Competition Ain't Nothin’' (L Hiram / W Webb)

No. 502

Vanessa Bell: ‘I Have No Intention of Confessing My Sins or Defending My Virtues’

Vanessa Bell - Self Protrait c1958. The Charleston Trust © Estate of Vanessa Bell

I recently took a trip to Milton Keynes to see a fine exhibition of the work of Vanessa Bell. (‘A World of Form and Colour’ is at the MK Gallery until 23 February.)

Bell was a painter and designer whose natural curiosity prompted her to experiment in multiple styles and media. A leading member of the Bloomsbury Group, she rejected the staid conventions of her middle-class upbringing and the art establishment, and enthusiastically embraced modern thought and practice. Hers was a truly creative life.

‘If you could say what you like about art, sex or religion, you could also talk freely… about the ordinary doings of daily life… Life was exciting, terrible and amusing, and we had to explore it, thankful that one could do so freely.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Stephen was born in 1879 into a wealthy Victorian literary family. Raised and educated in her Kensington home, she attended a local art school and then studied painting under John Singer Sargent at the Royal Academy.

‘When I got into the grubby, shabby, dirty world of art students at South Kensington, I wanted nothing else in the way of society. They were separate entirely from my home life and so a great relief. They knew no more about my private life than I about theirs, and in their company one could forget oneself and think of nothing but shapes and colours and the absorbing difficulties of oil paint.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell - Iceland Poppies

Following the death of both her parents, in 1904 Vanessa moved, with her sister Virginia and her two brothers, to Gordon Square in unfashionable Bloomsbury.  The change of scene felt liberating.
 
‘It was exhilarating to have left the house in which there had been so much gloom and depression, to have come to these white walls, large windows opening onto trees and lawns, to have one’s own rooms, be master of one’s own time, have all the things in fact that come as a matter of course to many of the young today, but so seldom then to young women.’ 
Vanessa Bell

In Gordon Square Vanessa set up the Friday Club, where male and female artists were treated as equals and exhibited together. The house also became a focus for the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia and fellow writers Lytton Strachey and E M Forster, the painter Duncan Grant, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the civil servant Leonard Woolf and the critic Roger Fry. It was in this milieu that she met another critic, Clive Bell, whom she married in 1907. 

‘We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins – we were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.’
Virginia Woolf

Vanessa Bell at Charleston © The Charleston Trust

In 1910 Fry organised the first major exhibition of Post-Impressionist art in England. Having seen the work of Manet, Matisse, Picasso and Gauguin, Vanessa’s painting turned toward abstraction, and she embraced simplified forms, flattened perspectives and bright colours.
 
‘Here was a sudden pointing to a possible path, a sudden liberation and encouragement to feel for oneself.’ 
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa painted still lifes and landscapes; elegant interiors and floral displays. She depicted her friends and family relaxing at home - reading, writing, sewing and drawing.

Her two sons are having tea with their nursemaids, Saxon Sydney-Turner is playing the piano, and three women are deep in conspiratorial conversation. A housemaid with a broom surveys the study, a woman in a white shift leans over her washstand, and Virginia is trying on some fancy dress. 
 
Vanessa was endlessly experimenting. She painted Fry in a pointillist style (what she called ‘the leopard technique’). She created cubist-inflected landscapes that echoed Cezanne. She borrowed the dark outlines of Gaugin. She explored collage and pure geometric abstraction.
 
‘You have to try and express your feelings about things in line. It must be sensitive, everywhere – nowhere must it become mechanical.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell (1879 - 1961), A Conversation, 1913-16 © Estate of Vanessa Bell

In 1913 Vanessa, Fry and Grant founded an artists’ cooperative, the Omega Workshops. In defiance of the conventional barriers between the fine and decorative arts, and of traditional formality, they designed furniture, textiles, accessories and ceramics with simple forms and bold colours. Objects were presented anonymously and sold unsigned. 

Dorothy Parker famously observed that the Bloomsbury Group 'lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.' Certainly, their romantic ties were complicated. Vanessa and Clive both took lovers throughout their lives. In 1914 she began an enduring association with Grant, who was gay and continued to have relationships with men. The couple installed themselves, with her two sons and Grant’s lover David Garnett, in Charleston Farmhouse in the Sussex countryside. And in 1918 they had a daughter, Angelica, whom Clive raised as his own child. 
 
'I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not, as long as one is forced to think.'
Vanessa Bell
 
At Charleston Vanessa and Grant hung their own paintings and drawings, and added Omega textiles and pottery. They painted walls, doors, screens, tables and fireplaces – joyous, colourful designs, created with loose, spontaneous brushwork, combining flowers, nudes, circles and abstract elements. The house was a living art installation, a social experiment.

‘There is a language simply of form and colour that can be as moving as any other and that seems to affect one quite as much as the greatest poetry of words.’
Vanessa Bell

Vanessa’s creativity was boundless. She and Grant received commissions to decorate society homes. They worked together producing ballet sets, church murals and the Famous Women Dinner Service, which included 50 plates painted with portraits of notable women throughout history. She also designed an image of Alfriston village for a Shell-Mex ad, and all of Virginia's books jackets.

Though Vanessa had been born into privilege, her life was touched by tragedy. In 1937 her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 her Fitzroy Street studio was destroyed by a bomb – and much of her early work was lost with it. The following year Virginia took her own life. 
 
Nonetheless Vanessa continued to paint. In 1958 she depicted herself wrapped in a green shawl, wearing a broad-brimmed straw sunhat. She regards us through horn-rimmed glasses. She has lived a life of creative freedom and independent thought. Her relationships have been mocked, her work has been diminished, but she is unconcerned.

‘I am absolutely indifferent to anything the world may say about me… If you cannot accept me as I seem to you to be, then you must give me up, for I have no intention of confessing my sins or defending my virtues.’
Vanessa Bell

In 1961, Vanessa Bell died at Charleston and was buried in the Firle Parish Churchyard. 

 
'I won't try to stop you
When you speak of the past.
Doubt is over now
And I can join in when you laugh.
Fascination makes us ask for more
Than we'd like to know.
I needn't explain.
I think you know.
Reassure me when my heart's
Not bold enough to bear her name.
If you were in my shoes,
And scared, I would do the same.
And though I may ask,
There's no need for past details.
For though I may laugh aloud,
My courage fails.
Did you know?’

Everything But the Girl, ‘Fascination’ (T Thorn)

No. 501

Waking Up in 1980: We Can Still Try Taking Three Steps at a Time

René Magritte. La Reproduction interdite (Not to Be Reproduced). Brussels, 1937

A little while ago, The Times reported the story of Luciano D’Adamo, a 68 year-old cook at a school in Rome, who was run over in 2019 as he was taking out the rubbish. (Tom Kington, The Times, 29 October 2024) 

Waking up in hospital an hour after the incident, D’Adamo was convinced it was 1980, and that he was 23 years old. He had no recollection of the ensuing 39 years. 

And then he looked in the mirror.

‘I saw an old man, not me - I screamed, and nurses tried to calm me down. I was terrified, it was like a horror film.’

The shocks continued. D’Adamo didn’t recognise his wife, who was not the girlfriend he had been dating in 1980. And then he met a man of 30 who introduced himself as his son. 

Luciano D’Adamo 2024. The Times

Since the initial trauma, D’Adamo’s partner has talked him through his lost years, using photos and videos. He has gradually recollected flashes of events - including the birth of his two sons; and Francesco Totti’s chipped penalty in Italy’s European Championship semi-final victory over the Netherlands in 2000.

 D’Adamo has also been acquainting himself with unfamiliar technologies: slim televisions and the internet; smartphones and satnav.

‘My son said it was like a street map, but alive.’

D’Adamo still finds himself trying to run up stairways three steps at a time, as he did when he was 23 - even though it makes him out of breath.

Luciano D’Adamo as a young man

This news story prompted me to wonder how I would feel if I woke up in 1980.

I’d be 16, and no doubt full of anxieties – about money, girls and chemistry exams; about my awkward posture, unruly hair and big ears. But I’d also be fit, healthy and playing sport. My mental faculties would be acute. And on the radio I’d be listening to ‘Going Underground,’ ‘Give Me the Night’ and ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’

Above all, I imagine that, unencumbered by the experience of setbacks and the knowledge of past failures, I’d be full of curiosity and enthusiasm, confident that the best of life is ahead of me.

We should be grateful that we don’t have to undergo the trials of Luciano D’Adamo. But with the start of each year, we do get the opportunity to turn back the clock; to set aside cynicism and scepticism, the wearying expectation that things tend towards disappointment and decay. 

We can still try running upstairs three steps at a time.

Rather poignantly, D’Adamo feels that two thirds of his life remain in darkness.

‘I have learnt that the only life lived is that remembered. The rest is lost in the wind.’

 Perhaps this is an encouragement to us all to create and cherish new memories in 2025.

 Happy new year!

'Hello stranger.
It seems so good to see you back again.
How long has it been?
It seems like a mighty long time.
I'm so glad you stopped by to say hello to me.
Remember, that's the way it used to be.
It seems like a mighty long time.
It seems like a mighty long time.
I’m so glad you’re here again.
If you're not gonna stay,
Please don't tease me like you did before.
Because I still love you so.
Although, it seems like a mighty long time.
It seems like a mighty long time.
I'm so happy that you're here at last.'
Barabara Lewis, 'Hello Stranger'

No. 500

Mary Cassatt: Someone and Not Something

Mary Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed, 1897, oil on canvas, 23 x 29 in.
Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

I recently watched a thoughtful documentary about the life and work of the American artist Mary Cassatt. (‘Painting the Modern Woman,’ 2023, directed by Ali Ray)

Cassatt created paintings of happy domesticity and maternal love. She produced pioneering prints of serene beauty. And she forged a career for herself in the face of a fiercely conservative establishment – demanding that she be considered ‘someone and not something.’

'I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work.’
Mary Cassatt

Cassatt, born into a wealthy family in Pittsburgh in 1844, was raised in Philadelphia. As a child she travelled throughout Europe, and at 15 she set her heart on becoming an artist. Having studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 1866 she moved to Paris, with her mother and family friends accompanying her as chaperones. There she took private lessons and visited the Louvre each day to copy Old Masters. She began submitting her work to the Paris Salon, the home of traditional Academic art, and in 1868 she had her first success.

'I doubt if you know the effort it is to paint! The concentration it requires, to compose your picture, the difficulty of posing the models, of choosing the color scheme, of expressing the sentiment and telling your story.’

Cassatt returned briefly to the United States during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. But her paintings were rejected by dealers there, and she received no commissions. And so she set off for Europe once again, studying and working in Parma, Madrid and Seville. In 1874 she settled in Paris, where she remained for the rest of her life. She was joined by her sister Lydia and then her parents.

Though Cassatt had some success at the Salon, with time and rejection she became frustrated by its snobbish, unadventurous jury system. Then in 1875 she was taken aback by some pastels by Edgar Degas that she spotted at an art dealer's.

'I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.'

The Tea [Also known as: Five O’Clock Tea] Mary Cassatt 1879-1880. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Degas and Cassatt struck up a friendship and conferred often about each other’s work. She evolved her technique, composition and use of colour and light, and in 1877 he invited her to show with the Impressionists, who had been holding their own exhibitions for a few years. She felt liberated, and from that point on remained an active member of the group until 1886, the only American officially associated with them.

‘At last I could work absolutely independently without worrying about the possible opinion of a jury… I hated conventional art. I was beginning to live.’

Lydia quietly reads the paper, sews and crochets in the garden. She works at a tapestry and takes tea with a friend. Here she is in an elegant yellow gown, seated in a private box at the opera; here driving a carriage, a niece at her side, a young groom at her back. A pensive girl in a plain white chemise arranges her hair in a neat ponytail. A bored infant sprawls across a blue armchair, legs akimbo. A loving mother bathes her sleepy child, feeds her, caresses her and gives her a goodnight kiss.

Cassatt’s subjects do not perform or present. We do not see them as objects of admiration or desire. They are simply individuals inhabiting their own private worlds. These are intimate scenes, yet the characters remain independent, elusive.

Mary Cassatt. The Letter - 1890 - 1891. Dypoint, etching, paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), New York

In 1890 Cassatt was inspired by an exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts. 

‘I dream of it and don’t think of anything else but color on copper.’

She responded with a series of her own drypoint and aquatint prints that conveyed the lives of modern females. 

A fashionable lady looks on as a seamstress adjusts her fitting. An attentive hostess offers her bonneted friend a biscuit. A woman at a desk, deep in thought, prepares to send a letter. A half-dressed woman arches over a washstand to bathe. Another perches on a bed as she adjusts her hair in the mirror.
Cassatt’s prints are delicately coloured, exquisitely simple.

Mary Cassatt The Child’s Bath. 1893. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Of course, Cassatt’s wealth had afforded her a great deal of opportunity. But she had to battle prevailing sexism every step of the way. She was not allowed to study nudes at the Pennsylvania Academy, working instead from plaster casts. In Paris she was barred from attending the École des Beaux-Arts. She was constantly chaperoned and restricted by propriety from painting urban scenes. 
Throughout her life, Cassatt was a consistent advocate for female equality, campaigning for women’s right to vote and for girls’ education. She summed up her position with elegant clarity:

'Women should be someone and not something.’

These words still resonate today, and I think they have an application beyond the battle against sexism. 
In the world of work there is a tendency to regard employees as anonymous assets, cogs in a machine, numbers on a spreadsheet; as a resource to be maximised, an investment to be realised, a headcount to be reduced. But progressive modern leaders know that dynamic, effective businesses are propelled by cultures that treat employees as individuals, with their own strengths and weaknesses; their own unique personalities and potential.

Employees should be someone and not something.

Mary Cassatt. Little Girl in a Blue Armchair - 1878. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Cassatt went on to help establish a taste for Impressionism in the United States and she acted as an advisor to some of the great American collectors. She also became a role model for young American artists who sought her advice. She died in 1926, aged 82, at Château de Beaufresne near Paris. She is remembered as a quiet revolutionary.

'Acceptance, under someone else's terms, is worse than rejection.’
 
Time for a festive break.
Have a restful Christmas. 
My next post will be on Thursday 9 January 2025.
See you on the other side, I hope.

'All the lights are coming on now.
How I wish that it would snow now.
I don't feel like going home now.
I wish that I could stay.
All the trees are on display now.
And it's cold now.
I don't feel like going home now.
I wish that I could stay.'
The Raveonettes, 'The Christmas Song’ (R Wells / M Torme)

No. 499

Francis Bacon and the ‘Trail of Human Presence’: If You Want to Get Closer to Someone, You Need to Stand Farther Away

Head of a Boy - Francis Bacon, 1960

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of portraits by Francis Bacon. (‘Human Presence’ runs at the National Portrait Gallery, London until 19 January.)

'How are you going to trap appearance without making an illustration of it?'
Francis Bacon

Bacon’s approach to portraiture was very much his own. His made his figures twist in torment and howl in anguish, so as to express latent anxieties and visceral fears. He distorted the human form, bent and buckled it, so as to articulate emotional intensity. He drew on stimulus unrelated to the sitter, merged identities and subverted reality, so as to establish truth. Warped, bruised and disfigured, corrupted and contorted, painted against black backgrounds or veridian green walls, sometimes his subjects seemed to emerge from the darkness; sometimes they receded into it.  

Self Portrait - Francis Bacon, 1973

‘In painting a portrait, the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person…The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation.’

Born into a wealthy Dublin family in 1909, Bacon was raised in Ireland and England. Scarred by a difficult relationship with his father (who struggled to come to terms with his emerging homosexuality), he had a troubled childhood. He ran away from school and drifted through his teenage years in London, Berlin and Paris, living off an allowance, taking occasional jobs and dodging the rent. 

‘I’m always surprised when I wake up in the morning.’ 

Bacon worked for a time as an interior designer, but, after seeing a Picasso exhibition in Paris, he determined to take up painting. Although he had no formal art training, he had developed a broad appreciation of avant-garde cinema, photography and literature.

 ‘I think art is an obsession with life and, after all, as we are human beings, our greatest obsession is with ourselves.’

‘Portrait of a Man Walking Down Steps’ - Francis Bacon, (1972) © The Estate of Francis Bacon/DACS

While many young artists at the time were exploring abstraction, Bacon committed to portraiture. His portraits of the late 1940s featured screaming men, trapped or shackled within transparent cages, in the midst of unspeakable nightmares, impotent in the face of unknown terrors.

‘I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our existence.’

Bacon was endeavouring to strip away artifice and display; to reveal the dark truths of human nature, the violence and horror he saw behind our defensive masks and shields. 

‘We nearly always live through screens… I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that perhaps I have been able, from time to time to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.’

From the early 1950s Bacon focused on portraits of friends and lovers: the artists Lucian Freud and Isabel Rawsthorne; the artist’s model Henrietta Moraes (who worked for a time in an ad agency); his partners Peter Lacy and George Dyer; the proprietor of Soho club The Colony Room, Muriel Belcher (who paid him £10 a week and free drinks, in return for attracting new clientele). And he often painted himself. 

‘I couldn’t [paint] people I didn’t know very well…It wouldn’t interest me to try to…unless I had seen a lot of them, watched their contours, watched the way they behaved.’

Initially Bacon worked with sitters in the studio, painting from life. But he became uncomfortable with this approach. 

‘I find it less inhibiting to work from them through memory and their photographs than actually having them seated there before me.’

Bacon turned to his friend Roger Deakins to take photographs of his subjects as a reference. He was also inspired by other sources: by magazine images, book illustrations and film stills; and by old master paintings, particularly Rembrandt’s self-portraits and Diego Velazquez’s depiction of Pope Innocent X.

‘I became obsessed with this painting, and I bought photograph after photograph of it. I think really that was my first subject.’

Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne - Francis Bacon
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved / DACS

And so, in one portrait we see the cracked glasses from the 1925 movie ‘Battleship Potemkin’; a painting of Freud is based on a photo of Franz Kafka; a self-portrait is derived from a photo of Freud; an image of Lacy originates from a holiday snapshot; and a depiction of Lisa Sainsbury has echoes of a bust of Nefertiti.

Bacon’s studio floor was littered with such reference material: pages torn from books and magazines, crushed, folded and splashed with paint: images of Joseph Goebbels, the bloody streets of Moscow during the October Revolution, a road accident, Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, Charles Baudelaire, a sparring rhinoceros.  

‘My photographs are very damaged by people walking over them and crumpling them, and this does add implications to an image.’

As Bacon endeavoured to capture the essence of a particular individual, as he reimagined a singular identity, he merged the image of his subjects with those of his friends and lovers; with his own image and with his reference material. Consequently, his unsettling portraits straddled the divide between distortion and likeness; between fiction and fact.

In seeking to get closer to his subjects, he stood farther away.

‘I would like my pictures to look as if a human had passed through them, like a snail, leaving a trail of human presence and memory trace of past events as the snail leaves its slime.’

'Something small falls out of your mouth and we laugh.
A prayer for something better.
A prayer for something better.
Please love me, meet my mother.
But the fear takes hold,
Creeping up the stairs in the dark.
Waiting for the death blow,
Waiting for the death blow.
Over and over,
We die one after the other.
Over and over,
We die one after the other.
One after the other, one after the other.
It feels like a hundred years,
A hundred years, a hundred years.’
The Cure, ‘One Hundred Years’ (L Tolhurst / R Smith / S Gallup)

No. 498

The Older the Singer, the Slower the Song

A Man Singing by Candlelight, by Adam de Coster, 1625–1635

The BBH Christmas Company Meeting was a big production number. A review of the year’s cultural, commercial and creative highlights, it featured motivational speeches, specially commissioned films and interviews, song and dance numbers, voting and amusing awards.

When I was first asked to speak at the meeting, I was a mid-weight Strategist. I made sure my piece was short and sharp, light and witty. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.

As I progressed through the business and took on senior office, I had a regular slot at the Christmas Meeting. My section became weightier, my delivery more confident, my jokes more elaborate. 

As Chairman I had a special responsibility for culture and ethics, and I liked to name-check people that had helped out in the course of the year. And so, with every subsequent annual meeting, my ‘thank you’ list grew longer, my illustrations more detailed and my oratory more laboured.

Eventually I realised that I was losing my audience.

I had started out as succinct and to the point. I finished off as rambling and verbose.

I read recently about a study into the changing tempo of songs as artists age. (Tom Whipple, The Times, 26 July 2024)

Geoff Luck from the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland analysed more than 14,000 tunes on Spotify, from acts with careers lasting at least 20 years. He discovered that, for every decade an artist aged, the average speed of their music declined by about 2 beats per minute. So, while Elvis Presley’s 1956 rendition of ‘Hound Dog’ clocks in at 178 bpm, his 1969 hit ‘Suspicious Minds’ is just 117 bpm. Similarly, Michael Jackson’s 1972 song ‘Rockin’ Robin’ is 173 bpm, but his 2001 single ‘You Rock My World’ is 95 bpm.

Writing in the journal bioRxiv, Luck observed:

‘We know that as we age, we tend to slow down. Cognitively, but also physically. In particular, our motor competence degrades as we age. So we can’t move as fast or as accurately…. It’s to do with neurobiological decay rather than just being chilled out or other things like that.’

We may recognise the broad theme of these findings in the world of work.

As we advance through our careers, we are accorded more respect and allowed more time to expand on our themes. Our juniors are reluctant to criticise, to suggest amendments and adjustments. We begin to enjoy having an audience. We start to like the sound of our own voice.  

The older the singer, the slower the song. 

It’s always worth stepping back and reflecting. Could I be more precise, more succinct? Could I make a bigger impact with fewer words? Could I leave them wanting more? No one ever complained about a shorter speech or a tighter presentation. Everyone needs an editor.

'Be sincere. Be brief. Be seated.' 
Franklin D Roosevelt

Perhaps we should take some inspiration from Elton John and Madonna. Luck’s study reveals that, over their long, successful and storied careers, they have bucked the trend, suffering no decline in tempo. They have justified our love.

'I want to kiss you in Paris,
I want to hold your hand in Rome.
I want to run naked in a rainstorm,
Make love in a train cross-country.
You put this in me.
So now what, so now what?
Wanting, needing, waiting,
For you to justify my love.
Hoping, praying,
For you to justify my love.’

Madonna, ‘Justify My Love’ (I J Chavez / L Kravitz / Madonna)

No. 497

Monet and the Power of the Repeated Image

Claude Monet - Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames, 1903

I recently visited a small exhibition dedicated to Claude Monet’s paintings of London and the River Thames. (‘Monet and London: Views of the Thames’ is at the Courtauld Gallery, London until 19 January.)

‘Every day I find London more beautiful to paint.’
Claude Monet

Monet first painted London in 1870, when, as a poor artist, he took refuge there during the Franco-Prussian War. Thirty years later he returned, a wealthy man, and installed himself in a top-floor suite at the prestigious Savoy Hotel, from the balcony of which he had exceptional views of the Thames.

Over three stays between 1899 and 1901, Monet created a series of works depicting Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and the Houses of Parliament (for the last of which he adjourned to a terrace in St Thomas’s Hospital on the south bank). He began the paintings in London, finished them later in his studio in Giverny, and presented them to the public at a successful exhibition in Paris in 1904.

Claude Monet- Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect, 1903

‘It has to be said that this climate is so idiosyncratic; you wouldn’t believe the amazing effects I have seen in the nearly two months that I have been constantly looking at this River Thames.’

 Monet was particularly enchanted by London fog. He relished its interaction with light; the fleeting colours; the romantic mood; the way buildings and structures loomed out of it, as if suspended in mid-air.

 ‘The fog assumes all sorts of colours; there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs, and the interest in painting is to get the objects as seen through all these fogs.’ 

 The very particular London atmosphere was later termed ‘smog.’ It was the result of industrial smoke and coal particles mixing with clouds, steam and vapour. Smog was often yellow due to large concentrations of sulphurous emissions. 

Claude Monet- Waterloo Bridge, Gray Weather, 1900

London was the most populous city in the world at the time, and the Thames was its central artery. The area was teeming with traffic, vibrant with commerce and heavy industry. Close to the Savoy an iron railway bridge led into the recently opened Charing Cross Station, and the south bank of the river was peppered with tall-chimnied factories. All of which Monet regarded as admirable symbols of modernity. 

Strange to think how perceptions have changed. Where he saw vitality, we see congestion. Where he saw progress, we see pollution. Where he saw romance, we see health hazard.

‘I so love London! But I only love London in the winter… Without the fog, London wouldn’t be a beautiful city. It’s the fog that gives it its magnificent breadth. Its regular and massive blocks become grandiose within that mysterious cloak.’

The Thames shimmers in the soft golden light, plied by small boats and barges. The horse-drawn double-decker buses grind to a halt on Waterloo Bridge, its grey granite piers glowing pink. The chimneys on the far bank belch smoke; a speeding train trails steam as it heads into Charing Cross; and the horizon merges with the sky. The vista is bathed in radiant colour, a yellow haze, a mysterious, haunting gloom. It turns blue and then orange. A small red sun pierces the fog. The Houses of Parliament, symbol of imperial splendour, float in the distance, shrouded in silver mist, reduced to abstract, shadowed shapes. ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ 

Monet would make a start on a picture and then move on to another five minutes later as the light changed, working on up to twelve canvases at a time. Later, back in the studio, he would exaggerate and enhance effects and colours.

‘My practiced eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere, and the difficulty is to get every change down on canvas.’

Claude Monet - Houses of Parliament, 1904

Monet observed that the power of his Thames series derived from the way it explored a consistent theme with infinite variety.

[The individual paintings] ‘take on their full value only in comparison and succession of the entire series.’

Strangely perhaps, I was prompted to reflect on the world of commercial communication.

Some years ago, I attended a talk by the esteemed fashion designer and retailer, Paul Smith. He explained that, when it came to window displays, he believed in ‘the power of the repeated image.’ Accompanying a pale blue cotton shirt with a royal blue version of the same shirt; and then navy and deep indigo; next to a twill or a denim execution of the same design; adding a polka dot pattern, a striped print or floral detail. It was theme and variation played by an orchestra of blue garments. And it created a pleasing, harmonious effect. At once both thrilling and reassuring.

[I saw] ‘Wonderful things, but none lasting more than five minutes, it is enough to drive you mad.’

After the success of the 1904 Paris exhibition, Monet was keen to present his Thames pictures in London the following year. Unable to borrow back enough sold works, he tried completing unfinished paintings from the original series. But eventually he gave up. The Courtauld show, featuring 21 views of the Thames, finally achieves his ambition, just 300 metres from the Savoy where many of them were created.

'A foggy day, in London town,
Had me low, and it had me down.
I viewed the morning with much alarm,
The British Museum, it lost its charm.
How long I wondered,
Could this thing last,
But the age of miracles, it hadn't past.
For suddenly, I saw you standing right there,
And in foggy London town,
The sun was shining everywhere.’
Frank Sinatra, 'A Foggy Day (In London Town)’ (G Gershwin / I Gershwin)

No. 496