Now You See Us: Buried Treasure and Hidden Gems

Mary Grace - Self portrait 1760’s . Oil on canvas

'Now You See Us’ at the Tate Britain, London (until 13 October) celebrates over 100 women artists who worked in Britain between 1520 and 1920. The exhibition presents paintings, pastels, needlework, photography and sculpture, that for the most part have been little known and rarely seen.

Here you’ll find Mary Beale’s glamorous depictions of 18th century society ladies, and a rather tender sketch that she made of her young son, his curly tresses tumbling to his shoulders. And there’s Mary Grace, whose only surviving painting is a self-portrait. In a fine primrose silk dress, she sits bolt upright, a palette resting on one arm, and regards us with stern authority.

Through the Looking-Glass, by Louise Jopling, 1875, acquired by the Tate. Photograph: Tate

In the 19th century rooms, Rosa Bonheur takes us to the Highlands, to mournful sheep grazing under a stormy sky. Elizabeth Forbes presents a naturalistic image of a farm labourer, head turned to the floor, in quiet conversation with a young woman at the edge of the woods - terribly romantic. And with its bold brushstrokes and flat appearance, Louise Jopling’s self-portrait suggests a Mancunian Manet.

There’s a good deal of buried treasure here, and many hidden gems.

Elizabeth Forbes - The Edge of the Woods

As we progress through the galleries, we also learn of the many hurdles women artists had to overcome.

For the most part, they were subject, first to their fathers, and then their husbands, limited to the domestic sphere. Having no access to apprenticeships, art was a private, amateur pursuit, one that was only available to the higher social orders, or those related to male artists. Their lives and work were poorly documented.

In 1768 Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser became founding members of the Royal Academy (along with 32 men). However, when Johann Zoffany memorialised the new institution with a group picture of the Academicians at a life class, Kauffman and Moser were reduced to two indistinct portraits on the back wall - women were barred from life classes on the grounds of propriety. It would take more than 150 years for the next woman to be elected to membership.

Johan Zoffany - The Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771-1772

There was a commonly held view that women were best suited to ‘imitation’ rather than invention. Miniatures, pastels and watercolours, sectors in which women thrived, were treated dismissively as ‘lower arts’ by the establishment. In 1770, the Royal Academy banned from its exhibitions ‘needle-work, artificial flowers, cut paper, shell-work, or any such baubles’. Joshua Reynolds, the Academy’s President, remarked that working in pastel was ‘just what ladies do when they paint for their own amusement.’

Nevertheless, they persisted. Between 1760 and 1830 some 900 women exhibited at public shows.

Flower painting was considered an appropriate artform for women. Mary Gartside created sublime floral watercolours, whilst at the same time pioneering colour theory. Mary Delany’s collages of spider lilies and flowering raspberry - made with coloured paper placed on black backgrounds (what she called her ‘paper mosaicks’) - are exquisite.

Mary Delany Rubus Odoratus 1772-1782 The British Museum

Gradually in the Victorian era women artists found new galleries, exhibition spaces and events that were less conservative than the Royal Academy. At the same time, they campaigned for access to training, governance and awards. Florence Claxton’s ‘Woman’s Work’ of 1861 shows some women fawning at the feet of a pompous man who sits under a false idol. Other women meanwhile are confined behind ‘the ancient wall of Custom and Prejudice,’ and the door to the medical profession is locked. Only one female artist, Rosa Bonheur, has climbed a ladder to view the ‘forbidden fruit’ beyond.

Florence Claxton, Women's Work, 1861

Founded in 1871, the Slade School of Fine Art in London offered women an education on equal terms with men, and, at last, access to life classes. Soon women students outnumbered men by three to one.

As we enter the 20th century rooms, and the progress towards broader freedoms, we see work from artists who have become more familiar to us: Gwen John, Laura Knight, Vanessa Bell, Nina Hamnet, Helen Saunders. Still, some of these magnificent painters have taken a century to receive proper recognition.

Leaving the exhibition, one can’t help thinking about wasted talent. So many remarkable artists unseen and unacknowledged. So many great works neglected and ignored.We may also be prompted to reflect on the world of work. Are our biases blinding us to untapped abilities and underutilised expertise? Are we failing to realise the true potential of the human capital at our disposal? Are we still missing out on buried treasure and hidden gems?

'I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.'
Maya Angelou

'The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know.
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow,
Years may go by.
So hold on to your special friend.
Here, you'll need something to keep her in:
"Now you stay inside this foolish grin"
Though any day your secrets end.
Then again,
Years may go by.’

Rickie Lee Jones, 'On Saturday Afternoons In 1963’

No. 475

‘Will It Paint?’: John Singer Sargent and the Semiotics of Style

John Singer Sargent - Lord Ribblesdale

I recently visited an exhibition considering the importance of clothes and costume in the portraits of John Singer Sargent. (‘Sargent and Fashion’ is at the Tate Britain, London until 7 July.)

The show is a celebration of sensuous silks and satins; of long buttoned bodices and pleated organza skirts; of Chesterfield coats, velvet jackets and crimson dressing gowns. Sargent captures the play of light and shadow across garments, their undulating creases and folds. He revels in the detail of a black tulle dress, a scarlet cape and a mauve sash; the elegance of a Chantilly fan, an antique lace collar and a Kashmiri shawl.

The exhibition prompts us to reflect on the coded language of fashion, the semiotics of style.

Sargent was born to American parents in Florence in 1856. As a child he lived in several European countries, before training and establishing his artistic reputation in Paris.

In 1882 Sargent was so taken with fellow American-in-Paris, the beautiful Virginie Gautreau, that he convinced her to pose for a life-size portrait without a commission. He presented her in a long black evening gown with a plunging neckline, her arms and neck bare, her face turned to one side in a classical pose – and with one of the jewelled dress straps slipping from her shoulder.

French society was scandalised by the ‘indecency,’ and both Sargent and his sitter were stung by the criticism. The artist repainted the strap in an upright position and left Paris soon afterwards. He kept the painting, subsequently called ‘Madame X’, until after Gautreau’s death.

‘I suppose it is the best thing I have done.’

John Singer Sargent - Madame X (with a vintage photo of the original portrait)

In 1886 Sargent settled in London, joining a social circle of actors, artists, composers and writers. His studio on Tite Street in Chelsea had previously been home to the painter James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde lived opposite. 

Although Sargent painted a number of British aristocrats, for the most part his clientele was international new money. Their wealth derived from finance, commerce and industry, and they were set on securing social status – by buying grand houses and estates; by keeping the right company, hosting magnificent parties and making appropriate marriages. The clothes they wore and the portraits they commissioned all contributed to the process of assimilation. A striking portrait would attract large crowds at exhibition. It would be much discussed and broadly reproduced. And a full-length Sargent could cost around $120,000 in today’s money. The exhibition curators term this phenomenon the ‘economy of images’.

Almost half of Sargent’s female sitters wore black gowns. While black retained its association with mourning, in the late 19th century it became fashionable for women of all ages, not least because new synthetic aniline dyes enabled an intense pure depth of colour. When, on a visit to his friend Claude Monet, Sargent discovered that there was no black paint to be found, he declared that he simply couldn’t work.

John Singer Sargent - Lady Sassoon

This period also saw the rise of haute couture. Name brands like Paquin or Doucet provided their clients with what novelist Edith Wharton described as ‘social armour.’ Many of Sargent’s sitters wore outfits from Charles Worth, an English designer who dominated Parisian fashion, and catered particularly to British and American customers. A Worth gown would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 today.

‘I have Delacroix’s sense of colour and I compose. A toilette [a complete ensemble, from the French word toile, cloth] is as good as a painting.'
Charles Worth

In the exhibition, Sargent’s work is displayed alongside examples of period fashion, including several original garments featured in his paintings. Although the artist claimed that ‘I only paint what I see,’ throughout the gallery we can observe where he has adjusted a strap here, removed a bow there. He clearly styled his sitters, pinning, draping, tucking and folding their gowns to create new shapes and textures. For his portrait of Lady Sassoon, he pinned her black silk taffeta opera cloak, so that the bright lining was more visible, creating a dramatic river of pink.

Foreshadowing today’s Instagram culture, one French critic noted, ‘there is now a class who dress after pictures, and when they buy a gown ask ‘will it paint?’’

Sargent was just as interested in painting fashionable men as women.

The surgeon Samuel Pozzi stands proud in a red dressing gown and Turkish slippers, one hand on heart and the other toying with the cord of his robe.

John Singer Sargent - Dr Pozzi at Home

The debonair Lord Ribblesdale looks rather superior in a long dark velvet-collared coat, buff breeches and polished black boots. Sporting grey kid gloves and a hunting whip, the elegant outfit is completed with a top hat and flamboyant silk muffler tied to one side. It was said of Ribblesdale that ‘he never stepped out of his picture frame.’

Sargent painted the young illustrator and designer W Graham Robertson holding a jade-topped walking stick and wearing a long, black wool Chesterfield overcoat. Robertson recalled that, during the sittings, the artist would ‘pull and drag the unfortunate coat more and more closely around me until it might have been draping a lamp-post.’ Sargent subsequently declared:

‘The coat is the picture.’

John Singer Sargent - W Graham Robertson

All in all, it’s a splendid exhibition, full of glamour, performance and personality.

Whilst marvelling at the flamboyance of the fashions featured in Sargent’s portraits, we may imagine that the sartorial codes and social values of late 19th century high society are a million miles away from our own. Surely we live in a more liberated, egalitarian world of informal attitudes and casualised style.

But clothes continue to signal something about our individual identity and sense of belonging. 
In the first half of my career, I dressed casually for work. Until my clients donned trainers, chinos and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. I promptly switched to city suits, keen to create some distance and differentiation. I was amused to learn that Sargent played a similar game. While painting his clientele in their elegant finery, he himself tended to wear a sober business suit.

On encountering the artist in 1899, the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt described him as ‘a rather good-looking fellow in a pot hat, whom at my first sight I took to be a superior mechanic.’

Whether we like it or not, we are constantly judging and being judged.


'When you wear your high-heeled boots with your hip-hugger suit,
It's all right, you're outta sight.
And you wear that cute mini-skirt with your brother's sloppy shirt,
I admit it, girl, that I can dig it.

When you wear your bell bottom pants,
I just stand there in a trance.
I can't move, you're in the groove.
Would you believe, little girl, that I am crazy about you?

When you wear those big earrings, long hair and things,
You got style, girl, that sure is wild.
And you wear that cute trench coat and you're standing and posing,
You got soul, you got too much soul.’

Brenton Wood, 'The Oogum Boogum Song’ (A Smith)

No. 474

‘It’s About Not Blinking’: The Unfiltered Truth of Steve McQueen

‘Ashes’ still from film - Steve McQueen

‘The fact of the matter is I’m interested in a truth. I cannot put a filter on life. It’s about not blinking.’
Steve McQueen

I recently visited the excellent Steve McQueen exhibition at Tate Modern (until 6 September 2020).

We’re greeted by the Statue of Liberty. She is filmed from a circling helicopter, and beyond her there are factories, warehouses and skyscrapers; bridges, barges and cruise ships - arrayed across New York Harbor, glistening in the sunlight. And yet she looks grim-faced, tired perhaps from holding her golden torch aloft for so long. Her garments of oxidised copper, in places caked in guano, seem somewhat tatty. The Dream she represents has achieved so much for so many. But now it is frayed around the edges.

We enter a room with a screen scrolling through old FBI files. They detail the surveillance carried out in the ‘40s and ‘50s on the singer, actor and Civil Rights campaigner Paul Robeson. Trivial observations and banal insights. Heavy type and crude redaction. A voiceover reads from another set of similar documents. We are immersed in a world of paranoia and anxiety; of secrecy and bureaucracy. The wary speculation of suspicious minds. The film runs for over 5 hours.

McQueen asks us to stay a little longer, to reflect on what’s going on around us - the mysteries, curiosities and injustices; the political intrigues and personal tragedies; the unvarnished truth. Stop, look and listen.

‘7th November’ - Single 35mm slide, sound, 23 minutes. Steve McQueen

'As far as I’m concerned, it’s all about the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. End of. To get to that, you have to go in close, uncover what’s been hidden or covered over. Obviously, the easy thing is not to go there, but I have a need to go there.’

McQueen takes us by the hand through the world’s deepest goldmine, the Tau Tona in South Africa. We encounter Tricky immersed in a recording studio. We reflect on the images NASA selected in 1977 to represent the human condition to possible alien life forms. We pause to examine McQueen’s nipple, Charlotte Rampling’s eye. 

Here’s a young man named Ashes, sitting on the prow of a boat in Grenada, where McQueen’s father was raised. Ashes looks fit, handsome, self-assured - completely at ease with the blissful, open-skied world around him. We pause for a while and take in the azure beauty of it all. There’s a curious scraping sound - metal on stone perhaps? - coming from the other side of the room. We realise the large screen we’ve been watching is double-sided. On the reverse there are two workmen preparing a grave. It is Ashes’ tomb. The seemingly carefree young man got caught up in a drugs incident. Memento mori.

Born in 1969, McQueen grew up in Shepherd’s Bush and Ealing, West London. He was an undiagnosed dyslexic, relegated to the lower stream at school, and he had to wear a patch to cover a ‘lazy eye.’ He felt isolated. 

'What I do as an artist is, I think, to do with my own life experience. I came of age in a school which was a microcosm of the world around me. One day, you’re together as a group, the next, you are split up by people who think certain people are better than you.’

Steve McQueen. (Photo: Thierry Bal)

McQueen studied art and design at Chelsea College of Arts and then fine art at Goldsmiths College. Increasingly he specialised in short films, and in 1999 he won the Turner Prize. In 2006, commissioned to visit Iraq as an official war artist, he commemorated the deaths of British soldiers by presenting their portraits as sheets of stamps. 

Since 2008 McQueen has created feature films. ‘Hunger’, ‘Shame’, and ‘12 Years a Slave’ considered an Irish hunger strike, sex addiction and slavery. With ‘12 Years a Slave’ he became the first black director to win a Best Picture Oscar.

For McQueen close scrutiny of the world frees us from the indifference and detachment of our comfortably numb, accelerated modern lives.

‘You want to cause a bit of trouble, stir things up a bit. We’re all a bit numb right now, so that’s even more important. It’s like, ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ Let’s make some noise.'

McQueen makes the point that the better we see - the more we bear witness - the more we are seen.

'It’s not just about anger. It’s about seeing, contemplating, serious consideration. It’s about being seen, and heard and recognised, so as the years pass they can’t make you invisible.'

We encounter Marcus, McQueen’s cousin, lying with his close-cropped scalp facing towards us. A scar runs from one end of his head to the other. Marcus relates the chilling story of how he shot his younger brother. A small mistake leads to another bigger mistake. And so, in an instant, one life is ended and another changes forever.

'Easy, Natty, easy.
Nah take it so rough.
Easy, Natty, easy.
Babylon too tough.
Them a walk, them a shoot, them a loot.
Babylon them a brute.
Them a walk, them a loot, them a shoot.
But we know evil by the root.’

Gregory Isaacs, ‘Babylon Too Rough’ (G Isaacs / W G Holness)

No. 295

Aubrey Beardsley: A Race Against Time

Aubrey Beardsley The Climax 1893 (published 1907)

‘Last summer I struck for myself an entirely new method of drawing and composition… The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent. Strange hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Pierrot costumes or modern dress; quite a new world of my own creation.’ 
Aubrey Beardsley, letter to an old school friend, 1893

Like its subject, the recent exhibition of the work of illustrator Aubrey Beardsley at the Tate Britain was cut short. However, you can still buy the splendid accompanying catalogue, and there was a fine documentary on BBC4 (‘Scandal and Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley’).

Working almost exclusively in pen and ink, Beardsley created a magical world of biblical and mythical figures; of chivalrous knights and damsels in distress; of fauns and satyrs, Pierrots and Harlequins. It was a world inhabited by masked women with cruel smiles and demonic stares; by fat ladies and femmes fatales; by cheeky cherubs and angry foetuses. There were flamboyant dresses, flowing locks and fashionable hats; malevolent serpents, exotic flowers and phallic candles. It was a world of fantasy and nightmare, both sinister and sensual. 

Beardsley helped define his times - an age of romance, style and decadence.

Beardsley was born into an impoverished middle class family in Brighton in 1872. When he was 7 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, or consumption as it was then commonly called. There was no known cure and he was condemned to a short life of coughing, weight loss and periodic haemorrhages.

The Black Cape, 1893, ink on paper. The British Museum

Too frail for sport, Beardsley immersed himself in art and literature, and his first poems and drawings appeared in his school magazine. He left education at 16 and took a job as a clerk at Guardian Life Assurance in London. 

When he was 18 Beardsley met the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, an artist he greatly admired. Beardsley had a portfolio of his sketches with him, and Burne-Jones was impressed.

‘Nature has given you every gift which is necessary to become a great artist. I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.’ 

Beardsley’s early work was clearly inspired by Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite style. But he was also influenced by the Japanese woodblock prints that were popular all over Europe at the time: delicately drawn figures set against abstract backgrounds; fine lines and intricate details contrasted with flat blocks of negative space.

On Burne-Jones' recommendation, Beardsley attended classes at Westminster School of Art. And in 1892 he received his first commission: to illustrate Malory’s ‘Le Morte Darthur.’ This required him to produce some 350 drawings when he got home from work in the evening. It was a massive undertaking. Despite the medieval subject matter, he introduced mermaids, satyrs and Pan figures to his work. He was naturally subversive.

The £250 Beardsley received for ‘Le Morte Darthur’ enabled him to leave his job. Ever aware of the illness hanging over him, he was a man in a hurry. In 1893 he supplied illustrations for the first issue of the new art magazine, The Studio, and he was himself the subject of the leading article.

‘The drawings here printed show decisively the presence among us of an artist, of an artist whose work is quite as remarkable in its execution as in its invention: a very rare combination.' 

Next Beardsley caught the eye of the great dramatist Oscar Wilde. He was commissioned to illustrate the English translation of Wilde’s play ‘Salome’.  Again Beardsley delighted in hiding provocative images in his illustrations. This time he even included teasing satirical caricatures of Wilde himself. His publisher had to be alert to Beardsley’s mischief.

‘One had, so to speak, to place his drawings under a microscope, and look at them upside down.’   

The Yellow Book Vol I, 1894

In 1894 Beardsley was appointed art editor of a new magazine, The Yellow Book. Yellow was a fashionable and somewhat risqué colour since it suggested the yellow covers of erotic French novels. In a radical move, text and image were independent of each other. The first edition of The Yellow Book was an instant and controversial success, and an elated Beardsley wrote to Henry James:

‘Have you heard of the storm that raged over No. 1? Most of the thunderbolts fell on my head. However I enjoyed the excitement immensely.’

Beardsley was now famous and fashionable. And he revelled in his transgressive reputation. 

'Of course, I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.’

Beardsley cut a dash on the London literary scene. He was long limbed and thin boned, with an aquiline nose and a bold centre parting. And he dressed like a dandy, in dove-grey suits, with bow tie, hat, gloves and cane. 

Ever the modern man, Beardsley was alert to new outlets for his work. On a visit to Paris he was impressed at the creative use made of commercial posters, and back in London he became an enthusiastic exponent of the medium. In an essay in The New Review he wrote:

'Advertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life, and if it can be made beautiful as well as obvious, so much the better for the makers of soap and the public who are likely to wash…The poster first of all justified its existence on the grounds of utility, and should it further aspire to beauty of line and colour, may not our hoardings claim kinship with the galleries?... London will soon be resplendent with advertisements… Beauty has laid siege to the city.'

But everything was about to change.

In 1895, Wilde was prosecuted for ‘gross indecency.’ At his arrest he was seen carrying a yellow book, and the public assumed it was a copy of the infamous magazine.  (In fact it was a French novel.) A mob pelted the windows of Beardsley’s publishing house and his spooked employer sacked the young artist.

Beardsley sold his home and retreated to Dieppe. There he embarked on a new magazine, The Savoy, for Leonard Smithers, an entrepreneur who published ‘what all the others are afraid to touch.’ Beardsley proposed that the cover of the first issue should feature a putto urinating on The Yellow Book. This was too much even for Smithers. Beardsley was now so notorious that some booksellers, including WH Smith, refused to display his work in their windows. After only eight issues, and within a year of its launch, The Savoy folded. 

Portrait of Beardsley by Frederick Evans

Beardsley’s health was failing fast, and yet he pressed on. While recuperating in Epsom in 1896, he created a set of designs for Aristophanes’ ‘Lysistrata’: a comedy about a sex strike by women frustrated with their warring husbands. Inspired by the huge phalluses he had seen on Ancient Greek vases, these were his most provocative images yet.

Later that same year Beardsley suffered a severe haemorrhage of the lung. He moved to the French Riviera in search of healthier air, and it was here that he died, in Menton in 1898. He was 25 years old.

Beardsley’s artistic career barely spanned seven years. Conscious of his illness, he was in a race to make the most of his life - an urgent, precipitous sprint to experience the world, to express himself, to make an impression. It was a race against time.

Beardsley teaches us to treat time as a precious commodity; to make every hour of every day count. He urges us to be ambitious for our talents despite the cards life has dealt us; to be vigorous in our quest for achievement, honest in our self-expression, unafraid of transgression or censure. He courted scandal because it accelerated his progress and because he didn’t have time for courtesies. Sometimes it’s best just not to care what other people think.

Beardsley’s friend the poet Arthur Symons summed him up thus:

‘He had the fatal speed of those who are to die young; that disquieting completeness and extent of knowledge, that absorption of a lifetime in an hour, which we find in those who hasten to have done their work before, knowing that they will not see the evening.’

''Cause we were never being boring.
We had too much time to find for ourselves,
and we were never being boring.
We dressed up and fought, then thought "make amends."
And we were never holding back or worried that
time would come to an end.
We were always hoping that, looking back
you could always rely on a friend.’

The Pet Shop Boys, ‘Being Boring’ (Lowe C, Tennant N)

No. 280