Wall of Treasures

Frans Francken II, Preziosenwand (Wall of Treasures), 1636

Detail

A whole book could be devoted to the history of landscape paintings within paintings (not a potential best seller perhaps, but I'd read it).  The art collection genre might be a place to begin - rooms crowded with paintings, not just on the walls but propped up on the floor and furniture.  The rocky mountain scene above is one of six different landscapes in the Wall of Treasures, first painted around 1610 by Frans Francken who 'may be considered the father of the genre' (Vlieghe, Flemish Art and Architecture 1585-1700).  Within a few decades, artists like Gonzales Coques and Gaspar Jacob van Opstal were doing art collection scenes whose miniature works of art were painted in by the actual artists who had created the full scale originals.  Thus the depiction of a collection was itself a collection of art works.  It makes you wonder whether any artists thought of including the gallery painting itself, anticipating its own arrival into the collection, to create a mise en abyme in which  landscape paintings would be repeated on a smaller and smaller scale ad infinitum. 

Gonzales Coques, Picture Gallery, 1671

Detail

What you are looking at here is the reproduction of a photograph of a painting of a painting of a landscape. And that last term might be broken down still further, since at this date a painting of a landscape was not really a painting of a landscape, but an imaginary construct based on observation of actual places and scenes from other paintings.  Just to the right of Francken's Wall of Treasures a 'real' tree can be glimpsed through a window, in what at first looks like a separate room until you realise it is presumably the reflection in a mirror, so that even within the world of the painting we are again only seeing the image of nature.  Galleries often have no windows, for practical reasons of course but aesthetic ones too - actual views might distract us from those the artists have projected onto rectangles of canvas.  Willem van Haecht's The Picture Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (1628) depicts a high ceilinged room full of art and a group of connoisseurs intent on studying it, but you feel that one or two will eventually tire of this close study and wander over to the tall window visible on one side to gaze out instead on the distant green parkland.  

Jan Vermeer, The Guitar Player, 1672

Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech's The Merry Company, 1622-4

Of course landscape paintings were collected on a more modest scale throughout Europe and are a natural component of interior scenes by artists like Pieter de Hooch, Dirck Hals, Gillis van Tilborch and David Teniers.  They can be found in some famous Vermeers: The Glass of Wine, The Love Letter and The Concert, where there is both a landscape painting on the wall and a landscape painting on the inside cover of the harpsichord.  One that is especially familiar to me from visits to Kenwood House at Hampstead Heath is The Guitar Player (above) - a simple view of a tree that could be a snapshot of the heath that surrounds the house.  The tree's foliage resembles the girl's hair, a kind of compositional echo you often find in these paintings.  Another example (above) is the lacy clouds and plume-like trees in Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech's The Merry Company.  And here is Amy Powell's description of another Merry Company, painted by Pieter Codde (c. 1633):

'Lit from the upper left and painted mostly in white, grey, and sandy flesh tones, the musicians lean and look in various different directions, the men’s hats ending in sharp little points. Lit from the upper left and painted in the same sandy colours, the decaying vegetation in the landscape likewise leans in various different directions and ends in sharp little points, as if the landscape painting had somehow magically adapted itself to the attitudes of its viewers. Thin on iconography (a brewing storm at most), the landscape would have little to recommend itself as a moralising allegory if not for its funny way of resembling the merry company of musicians, who are of course happily oblivious to their inevitable disappearance.'

In this Oxford Art Journal article, Powell notes that paintings in Dutch interiors are often dark or indistinct, subordinate to the surrounding furniture.  She draws a modern parallel with Alan McCollum's Surrogate Paintings (blank images hung in groups) and his Perpetual Photos - blurry blow ups of paintings glimpsed in black and white TV movies. To these I would add the Polish artist Rafał Bujnowski's Framed painting (Whistler), 2002-3, which is a version of the painting hanging beside Whistler's mother repainted 'life size' so that it looks like a radically abstract landscape.  (Of course I'm conscious in writing this that I am only actually seeing it reproduced here on my screen, at a scale smaller than Whistler's).  In an earlier post here I mentioned Gerhard Richter's Details, extreme close-ups of paint that 'appear like fictitious landscapes.'  If you were to enlarge a landscape painting-within-a-painting sufficiently you would reach a scale where a new view seems to emerge in the patterns of its pigments.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 1871

 

Detail

The Liverpool Cityscape

I've been in Liverpool this week and managed to squeeze in a trip to the Walker Art Gallery.  I think my favourite painting in their collection is Simone Martini's Christ Discovered in the Temple (reminiscent of the attitude my son assumes when he's done something wrong), but there are some great landscape paintings too.  In Poussin's Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion (1648), for example, with its contrast between the serene classical architecture and the wild rock formation towering above, you can almost hear the wind blowing menacingly through the trees.  Much wilder still is John Martin's The Last Man, a rendering of Thomas Campbell's apocalyptic poem, and there is a dramatic view of The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel (c. 1824) by Louis Daguerre, painter of dioramas, inventor of the daguerrotype.  However, for me the most striking landscape painting in the museum (and you really have to see it rather than peer at a jpeg) is this:

J.M.W. Turner, Landscape, c1845

Leaving the permanent collection, I came to an exhibition celebrating the John Moores Painting Prize.  In 2006 this was awarded to Martin Greenland for Before Vermeer's Clouds.  The painting uses the sky from Vermeer's A View of Delft and according to the artist's statement, it was originally to be titled 'A Vision of Heaven', designed to have 'the same appearance of stability and unhurried peace as Vermeer’s, and incorporate as many elements of the stable or perpetual as could be organised.'  It's quite a risky strategy, as the borrowed sky and 'perpetual' landscape elements could seem nothing more than dull pastiche.  You can see other examples of Greenland's imagined landscapes on his website.

Last year, during Liverpool's turn as European City of Culture, the artist Ben Johnson was in residence at the Walker completing his Liverpool Cityscape.  Seeing it up close this week, I thought it quite strange to be described as a "celebration" of Liverpool (as in the video clip below), because it shows an lifeless city, emptied of people and traffic.  The background is painted with the naturalistic realism you would expect in a panorama, but the foreground buildings resemble a computer generated architectural model with their dimensions oddly distorted.  Everything is pristine and well lit and the dominant colour is the dead beige of recent urban regeneration.  Still, according to the Liverpool Echo, 'Ben Johnson's painstaking and wondrous Liverpool cityscape – the distillation of team work referencing 3,000 photographs and occupying 24,000 man hours – is the definitive visual statement of our 2008 renaissance.'

View of Delft

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, 1660-61

Last week I saw the most beautiful painting in the world, according to Proust. Vermeer's View of Delft is in the Mauritshuis, opposite the Girl with the Pearl Earring, the 'Dutch Mona Lisa', which was surrounded by onlookers like the Mona Lisa itself. The View of Delft also seemed popular but nobody looked sufficiently moved to expire in the manner of Proust's character, the writer Bergotte:

'The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer's View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious patch of wall. "That's how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. "All the same," he said to himself, "I shouldn't like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers." He repeated to himself: "Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall." Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: "It's nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked." A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead.' (from The Captive)

Where is the patch of yellow? It seems to me to be this section of roof. With apologies for another longish quotation, here's a discussion of the issue by Tom Lubbock.

'There are several possibilities in the cluster of buildings at the right end of the far shore. The most obvious is the glimpse of yellow roof (not wall) to the left of the turreted building. The next is the strip of bright wall (not especially yellow) to the right of the turreted building. When he wrote, Proust was probably working from memory – or a black- and-white reproduction.

But let's assume it's the oblong of roof. There's a question you can ask about any famous detail. Does it work by itself, or does it only work in the context of the whole picture? If you extracted the detail, would it be a strong picture in its own right, or would it be hard to see what the fuss was about?

The passage suggests that the little patch all by itself, the sheer precious substance of its painting, so dense and luminous, is what transfixes Bergotte. But the picture suggests otherwise. It's only within the whole view that this patch – suddenly brighter and purer than you'd expect, and with its yellow animated by the adjacent reds and blues (Vermeer always a great one for the primaries) – blazes out. It's not a self-sufficient and extractable gem. It's an integrated effect, a climactic note. 

In other words, Bergotte dies under an illusion. His illusion is normal enough. With any climactic note, we tend to feel that it can be isolated and extracted – that its power and preciousness lie somehow within itself, rather than depending on that to which it is a climax.

But this is why it's such a good image of the man's fading consciousness and will to live. Bergotte wants to see this detail as a separately precious thing, something he can isolate and grasp in his hand. Yet he can't – any more than can hold on to this last precious moment of his life.'

Postscript 2019

Proust's treatment of Vermeer in his novel is discussed in a review of 'Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry' be Joseph Leo Koerner in the New York Review of Books.

'On a May morning in 1921 Marcel Proust ventured from his bed, where he spent most of his time, to see an exhibition of Dutch painters at the Jeu de Paume. ... So famous were Proust’s reflections on Vermeer that the 1921 exhibition included The View of Delft just so the ailing novelist could behold his favorite painting one last time.  ... A photograph survives of Proust’s excursion. The last taken of the writer before he died, it shows him standing erect and elegant outside the Jeu de Paume. Before leaving his bed he confided that he didn’t want to ruin the exhibition by dying in the galleries.'