by Simon Tait The London Magazine, October/November 2018
Hokusai: the Master’s Legacy, ed. Rosella Menehazzo, published by Skira
The early 20th century French printmaker and art historian Henri Focillon described Hokusai as “freely inspired and inebriated by life and its phenomena” (Hokusai, 1914) at a time when the Japanese artist was influencing not merely design but very lifestyles, having been barely known outside his own country 50 years before.
Hokusai, who died in 1849 aged 90, led Japan’s equivalent of the Impressionists, bringing the everyday, the beautiful, the comical and the erotic to a newly eager general public as the country entered a modern era, working largely in a classical medium, woodblock, in a radical modernist way.
In the last couple of decades Katsushika Hokusai’s name has become almost as familiar worldwide as those of Cézanne and Monet, and his Great Wave off Kanagawa has become the most reproduced image in the world, and last year’s British Museum exhibition, Hokusai: beyond the great wave, was a sell-out visited by 150,000 people.
His recent rise in Western consciousness is thanks to scholars like the BM’s Tim Clark, who curated that show, and Rosella Menehazzo of Milan University. After more than 20 years studying the Japanese art of the late Edo period, she has edited the book which, while the British Museum’s exhibition underlined Hokusai’s standing with the story of his long life, places him as a major influence not only among his own contemporaries but on artists, from the east and west, to the present day.
Hokusai – the last of several names he adopted as he passed through phases of his life – was born in a district of what is now Tokyo, the son of a mirror-maker from whom he inherited nothing except a skill to design the decoration around mirrors. At 14 he was an apprentice woodcarver and at 18 had become the pupil of an artist of the ukiyo-e style of woodblock prints and paintings that focussed mostly on images of famous geishas and Kabuki actors. Menahazzo translates ukiyo-e as “Pictures of the Floating World”.
He began to develop a reputation for his spare and faultless line, but regarded his first 60 years as a preparation for what was to occupy the last third of his life. ‘…until the age of 70, nothing I drew was worthy of notice” he wrote in a translation of his Manga by Henry D Smith III. “At 73 years I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. Thus when I reach 80 years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at 90 to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at 100 years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at 110 every dot and every stroke will be as though alive. Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine are not false”.
He applied his ukiyo-e techniques to a much broader range of subjects, principally to nature, and eschewing traditional practice. He won a competition by painting a single blue curve on a large sheet of paper and chasing across it a chicken whose feet had been dipped in red paint, saying that it represented the Tatuita River with red maple leaves floating in it. In the 1820s, able to make use of imported Prussian blue, he produced his seminal Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, followed by the three volumes of One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, the last volume of which was published in the year of his death.
At 50 he created his own exhaustive manuals on how to draw, the Hokusai Manga, which included facial types and changing expressions as well as of flora and fauna, street life and the supernatural. There were 20 in all, five published posthumously, and they are still reproduced and much-used references.
Menahazzo puts Hokusai in the context of the modernised Japan of the late Edo period (1603-1868), which ended more or less with the opening up of trade to the West, and the other ukiyo-e artists that rose alongside him. His pupils Hokkei, Hokuba, Shinsai and Gakutei, and his peers Eisen and Utamaro established great success, but the most famous of them, Eisen, always acknowledged that Hokusai represented “an absolute point of reference for him in painting”, Menegazzo writes.
Hokusai and his fellows were making art for public spaces and places, but also for private consumption, including the abuna-e – “dangerous pictures” – which were a testament to the liberalised society of the late Edo they illuminated. Often there were coy hints at sexuality such as glimpses of red underwear, red being seen as a provocative colour and forbidden for outer clothing by the sumptuary laws. But they could also be explicit, such as Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife which, writes Menegazzo, “only the consummate skill and wit of the master could render so captivating and devoid of bad taste”.
A flood of Japanese art hit the West following the arrival of the American fleet under Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and the trade deal sealed by the Convention of Kanagawa, coincidentally the site of Hokusai’s most famous image. It inspired designers and artists across Europe and America in the later 19th century and through the 20th, with The Wave appearing in Van Gogh’s Starry Night of 1889, and being the image for the cover of Debussy’s La Mer in 1905.
In Tate Modern’s 2018 exhibition Picasso 1932 there is a suggestion that Picasso was inspired by Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, the lascivious tentacles seducing the sleeping woman, to paint the series of reclining nudes of Marie-Thérèse Walter he made at Boisgeloup that year when his own work was becoming more sensual.
The instructions of his Manga – the word means random or impromptu pictures – in which the emphasis was on the simplicity of the fewest possible but perfect lines to tell simple stories were seized on by the Impressionists, among others, liberating them from existing assumptions about how to draw and paint. It is the basis of the modern genre that borrows the same word, the comics and animations that have created world-wide market worth billions of dollars. It is not too much to claim that modern art begins, at least partly, with Hokusai, and as Rosella Menehazzo that he brings to the current era “the art of the Floating World in full bloom”.
by Simon Tait The London Magazine, February/March 2016
Frank Auerbach
Tate Britain
When Frank Auerbach first came to public notice – emerged rather than burst – in the 1950s he was noted as a “British Expressionist” in the white hot enthusiasm for the American abstract colourists Clement Greenberg (not to mention the American government) was punting around the world with spectacular success.
It was a gross misreading of his work. Auerbach was not concerned with conveying an emotional response but has spent his life examining his changing relationship with objects, people and scenes to which he has returned repeatedly for 60 years. He is part of an extraordinary post-war flourish of British talent that was too often only seen in the context of the likes of Pollock, Rothko and Newman and, difficult though it can sometimes be to read, Auerbach’s work is never abstract in the sense of internalised perception. His paintings are not mere expressions, they are evocations, and although the paint is applied very quickly and often in large amounts, the process can be prolix. Often they require long consideration by the viewer, a case in which patience is always rewarded as a form gradually becomes plain from a maelstrom of paint. That is Auerbach’s inimitable magic.
This exhibition is not just a retrospective, it is the artist’s own statement on his life’s work, chosen, he says, not particularly chronologically and certainly not stylistically or by subject or context, but so that “each work be considered as an absolute which works (or does not work) by itself”. Yet there is a chronology in that six rooms are each devoted to a decade, with the seventh being a kind of summary by his friend and long time sitter the curator Catherine Lampert.
Auerbach builds his paintings, and famously his impasto can be several inches thick so that some of the frames here are more like vitrines, so deep do they have to be to accommodate the mountain of oil paint. But as he shows with his choices, he can excavate an idea as much with sparse almost faint strokes as he can by piling paint on with a palette knife (and the piling on is not a process of correction, he will scrape off ounces of pigment if he feels it is not going right and start again).
One of the wonders of Auerbach’s art is that he gets so much from so little, and it would be easy to assume that each image of a sitter or a scene is a new attempt to get it right, writing-off what went before. It doesn’t work like that for him: each essay is an articulation for the truth he sees at a moment, and sometimes developing over years, and each offers answers to a perception of a new verity. He has got a whole world out of Mornington Crescent. In Lampert’s room she has included three images from 1988 called J.Y.M. Seated in the Studio in which his long-time model Juliet Yardley Mills is painted in exactly the same pose. They could almost be like different state impressions from a print process, but they are individual paintings in which Auerbach has found different qualities in the scene through using different pigments – none is a preparation, each is a resolution.
He introduces himself in the first room by covering a huge span of his early work. There are two portraits of his friend and stalwart sitter Stella West (“E.O.W.”). One is a charcoal drawing of 1959-60 in which the exquisitely drawn features – almost a Henry Moore face – look out expressionlessly and slightly austerely from a piece of paper that is dotted with marks, bits of stuck-on labels, old adhesive marks, as though she is an authoritative presence in a space of casual chaos (there is a self-portrait of 1958 in the same vein). Four years earlier he had painted a Head of E.O.W. in a dark study in which the sitter’s melancholy face emerges from a background of thick dark swirls, mordantly pale and looking down in an almost sculptural statement of features. And then again, Head of E.O.W II of 1961 is so impasto it cannot help but be a flurry of movement, and in this impression there is gentleness, humour, affection, fun – action painting in which the action is in the image, not the energy of the artist.
Auerbach’s story is remarkable but not unusual for the mid-20th century. He came to England aged eight on the Kindertransport leaving behind the parents he was never to see again. Naturalised British in 1947 he studied at St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art, but with his friend Leon Kossoff did David Bomberg’s famous evening classes at Borough Institute which perhaps gave him the confidence to be so different. His first solo show was at the Beaux-Arts in 1956 and he was taken up by the critic David Sylvester, and his reputation grew so that in 1978 the Arts Council gave him a Hayward Gallery retrospective when he was still in his forties. In 1981 he was a strong part of the RA’s seminal New Spirit of Painting, curated by Christos Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal and Nicholas Serota, in which he took his place alongside not only Francis Bacon, R B Kitaj and Lucian Freud but Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Pablo Picasso as representing the most inventive work of the 1970s.
By then he had found his place, Camden, from which he seldom budges, painting what he sees about him and each time extracting a new essence, and at 85 he is painting with undiminished enthusiasm and invention – the most recent painting here is one of his studio from 2014. Primrose Hill appears frequently in his show, cold, stark and slashed with blood red fissures in Spring Sunshine, angular but festively green and red in Winter Evening of 1974-5, and then in 1971 a joyous sweep of flowing warm summer strokes in Primrose Hill.
His portraits are not so much likenesses as descriptions, and he has included two of his son Jake in 2008-9 and 2009-10, both head and shoulders in exactly the same pose, but the first is oil the other charcoal and pencil, and the effect is the same as having a different conversation with the same person. In fact, the next Auerbach exhibition should be in the National Portrait Gallery.
In this exhibition Auerbach shows himself as an artist who has accomplished, the points in his life of those accomplishments being irrelevant, and in his catalogue essay the arts historian T J Clark has a phrase which sums it up perfectly: “…full of grimful glee…”.
by Simon Tait The London Magazine, Dec/Jan 2016
Giacometti: Pure Presence
National Portrait Gallery
Giacometti lived a peculiarly double life, despite his lifelong quest for a “real”, as he put it. From the age of 21 he mixed in the dizzying artistic milieu of Montmartre, experimenting and eventually coming to terms with his own perception, pulling his art towards the acetic spindly bronze figures, the Pure Presence of the exhibition’s title, that would bring him acclaim. But for the summer he went home to Switzerland to paint quiet little conventional still lifes and portraits of his family. Which was the real Alberto?
What the curator Paul Moorhouse does with this account is trace Giacometti’s development from the very beginning through his portraits. That way he attempts to grasp the unique reality of perception Giacometti strove after turning away from the straightforward Impressionism he began with.
In Paris Giacometti lived in what became a rather famous squalor, eventually kept in some sort of order after the Second World War by a devoted wife, but he came from a well-to-do middle-class Swiss family.
His father was the successful Post-Impressionist painter Giovanni Giacometti who saw his eldest child’s promise with a pencil very early. At 13 he was given some Plasticene and made a head of his younger brother which pleased Giovanni so much he cast a bronze of it, and at 17 he was sent to art school in Geneva. His father took him to Italy where he discovered Tintoretto and Giotto who opened his eyes to the audacity that was possible in capturing the human form. In 1922 Giovanni decided to send him to Paris and the best artist/teacher there Antoine Bourdelle at the Swiss-founded Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where the stifling academic rules of the Ecole Des Beaux Arts were eschewed and life drawing was the key discipline.
Alberto was 21 and for the next decade or so in Paris he experimented with Abstractism, Primitivism, Cubism, and most intriguingly Surrealism. His friends were André Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Man Ray, and later Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. At the opening of his first solo exhibition at the Galérie Pierre Colle in 1932 the first through the door was Picasso.
We see nothing from this Parisian maelstrom of activity when Giacometti was looking for his own reality in the only city in the world where he had every new thought on the matter immediately to hand. Instead we see the other side of his creativity, the gentle portraits of family done during his annual returns to the cosy tranquility of Stampa, the family home village near Switzerland’s Italian border. He was looking for his metier, and in 1921 he made a marble relief portrait of his mother from a chalk drawing by his father of more than a decade before. In Post-Impressionist patchwork oils we have his sister Ottilia, his brother Boris sleeping, his other brother Diego, who was to be Giacometti’s principal model for the rest of his life, standing in the living room, tall, handsome, neatly dressed and aggressive, quickly painted and apparently looking for a fight. But what was Alberto looking for?
We see him grappling with structure in pencil, oil and bronze. In his sculptures from the early 1920s Giacometti is even scribbling on his forms to get his structures, and he struggles particularly with his father’s likeness – he has bronzed a head of Giovanni and scratched on it the facial features that are effectively graffiti. Another head of his father looks naïve, until on closer looking you see the detail he’s worked up, every hair of the salt and pepper beard in place. It’s as if by returning to the domus he goes back to his creative nursery to remind him of the basic tools before he plunges back into the crucible of Paris and the struggle for his real.
But he abandoned many pieces, dissatisfied with his attempts to create a completely accurate head and continually starting again: his hand was not conveying to the clay what was in his mind’s eye – while his painted portraits, and there’s one of himself in the act of painting, are resolutions his father would have approved.
At the Academie, although he had praise of his drawing, he had difficulty with the nude form, finding it impossibly complex. He stuck to heads, going back to Cubist basics to find structure. Then for a while he abandoned working from the life completely as being too distracting from the essence, using only memory to try to capture his wanted image.
Then in 1933 Giovanni died and Giacometti had a complete re-evaluation of his work, almost as if released from the need to conform with the values his father espoused. He broke with the Surrealists and worked with a new independence, renewing his efforts to resolve the problem that each time he looked at his model he saw something different.
He began to model to the size he saw in perspective, rather than actual size, and there is a drawing of his mother Annetta from 1937 in which he has abandoned all signifiers of identity to leave a solitary presence, as Moorhouse describes it, and she was a regular model until her death. From this point his Swiss and Parisian selves seem to be reconciled. A resolution began to form when that year he saw his model Isabel Nicholas at a distance in the Boulevard St-Michael, her features unseeable but her presence unmistakeable, surrounded by and commanding space.
The war was an impasse in Giacometti’s Parisian quest and he went back to Switzerland in 1941 when he met his future wife, Annette, his other main muse from then on. He stayed in Geneva where he made tiny sculptures of anonymous human forms. In 1945 he brought them back to Paris in matchboxes, and they were the start of the tall, thin figures that are the Giacometti the world knows, the Pure Presence.
We don’t think of Giacometti, who died in 1966 aged 64, as a portraitist, but by being in the National Portrait Gallery this exhibition makes clear that, in the simplest terms, that is what he is. But this exhibition sets out to show that to say he is a portraitist is as inadequate as to say he is a sculptor.
by Simon Tait The London Magazine, October/November 2015
Lucky to be an Artist
by Unity Spencer,
Unicorn Press
The title Unity Spencer has chosen for her autobiography is ironic, although not intentionally. She may have been lucky to be an artist, but she had the supreme misfortune to be the daughter of a great one.
The children of great artists are on a hiding to nothing. They have the creative genes, often, and may be talented, as is Stanley Spencer’s daughter, but are doomed always to be compared, and negatively.
For Unity it was many degrees worse. Born in 1930 she was effectively abandoned by her parents, her mother to mental illness when she was eight, and her father when she was three to the disastrous and short-lived relationship with the artist Patricia Preece. Unity’s life as related in her book has been cursed by self-doubt, depression, frustration, exploitation, misplaced trust and the mental cruelty of people who should have loved her.
Not least damaging was the careless insensitivity of Stanley. As a teenager she was desperate to be part of his lonely artist’s world and when he was painting his complex allegorical piece Christ delivered to the People she offered to help with the boring bits, painting some of the pebbles. “He was very sweet and considered for a moment, and then with a little heave said, ‘I think I’d better do them myself’”. What a devastating dismissal for a vulnerable and lost young woman.
Yet through it all she paints, not with conspicuous market success – she would always be compared to Stanley – but because that is what she does. She is an artist.
This was a valiant project for her to take on, confronting all those demons and making her struggle so public. Both her parents – Stanley (“D”) and Hilda (“M”) – were artists and she adored them unconditionally, but the saddest line in her memoir, almost a throw-away, is that D “loved art more than me”.
Stanley and Hilda both came from families of artists. Hilda was the daughter of George Carline, the British painter and illustrator, and she met Stanley at the Slade (where Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash and David Bomberg were all fellow students). They were married in 1925 and their first child, Shirin, was born a year later. By the time Hilda arrived in 1930 Spencer was famous – in 1927 his enormous The Resurrection, Cookham was described in The Times as “the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century”, and he was engaged in his gargantuan opus, Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, his homage to the First World War dead of which he had first hand knowledge. Unity recalls crawling around at his feet while he was finishing what would be his greatest monument.
But Stanley was in many ways a child, often wise and penetrating but also willful and selfish. Born in the village of Cookham in Berkshire he was miserable whenever he was away from it, though Hilda had no love for the place, and Unity had a love-hate relationship with it for most of her life. He had what ought to have been an idyllic family life, a loving wife, two adorable daughters, a home in his beloved birthplace and a successful career (in 1932 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy). Yet he fractured it irreparably by going off with the predatory Preece and marrying her, though she soon returned to her lesbian lover leaving the marriage unconsummated. Yet to Unity, her sister and their mother, “he was pure and true, without an atom of falseness”.
The truth is probably that the Preece affair damaged Cookham for Unity for ever, and what love she had for the village was because that was where Stanley was, even after his death in 1959, and was not grateful when the Cookham house subsequently fell to her. For Stanley he had no sense of responsibility other than to his art, so that his daughters were farmed out to different areas of the extended family, to people that in her chronicle seem to be caricatures of the idiotically straight-laced adults from Richmal Crompton’s William books. When a year or two after Stanley’s death (the poor muddled M had died of cancer in 1950), scared, alone and confused about love and sex, Unity shacked up with a paranoid egomaniac 20 years her senior, Leslie Lambert, and at 31 had a baby, many of those in loco parentis never forgave her.
Through it all she painted. Sometimes it was hard when she found “the business of drawing and painting a distressing experience” and she felt anger which “rose like sap as I thought of the cruel irony that my father… could have contributed to such a loss in me. I knew I had talent, and a gift to be an artist…”.
So she kept drawing, painting, making prints, her son John keeping her feet on the ground. Her pictures are not her father’s meticulous forms, they are more post-impressionistic, more passionate, and her metaphors are of her own troubled mind rather than his religiosity. Her sense of colour is subtle, her forms are sure but fluid, her depth palpable, her composition seductive. A pencil drawing of Stanley, or as he would have called it a “kopf”, done two years before his death is sensitive, accurate but full of concentration and life, while the oil for which this was a sketch is a contemplative and touching account; and 35 years later another drawing of Clapham High Street is a neat and busy streetscape that tells its story simply.
“People say to me, ‘Oh Unity, it must be so relaxing to be an artist’. Absolute rubbish. Art is hard work. I am lucky to be an artist.”
She taught, mostly boys, which she found at times frustrating but at others fulfilling, but now she continues to look, to admire and to experiment with lithography and etching. In 2001, aged 70, she went to a weekend organised by the Landmark Forum, a self-help programme, at which she was encouraged to stand up ands say what she was giving up: “I was giving up being a victim. As I said those words, the depression that dogged me for most of my adult life left me in a flash and I never suffered it again”.
by Simon Tait The London Magazine, June/July 2015
Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint
The Wallace Collection
The most important image in this little exhibition has no title or date, in fact it isn’t really a painting at all. Its label describes it simply as “Experimental Canvas”, and it is a laboratory and archive for probably the most inventive English painter of them all, the painter that lifted the status of portraiture beyond society vanity. “The problem with Reynolds” his bitter rival Gainsborough is supposed to have complained “is that he is so various!”
On this medium-size scrap of canvas, one of several he would have had in his studio over a long career and preserved in the Royal Academy, Reynolds would try out pigments and media; the daubs are sometimes let to run, the thing has been turned round to find a new space or place a smudge nearer to his painting, and is laced with his notes – one can be made out as “Orp. White Y with the Varn” which can be translated as “orpiment, white, yellow with the varnish”. Orpiment is a mineral that makes a deep orange colour.
Joshua Reynolds was an Enlightenment man whose friends in his younger life included the likes of Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick and Edmund Burke, chums who are said to have persuaded him against his own judgement to agree to be the first president of the Royal Academy. The RA was the medium by which generations of young artists learned the practice and thoughts of the extraordinary.
He experimented all his life, and was notorious for it even in his own lifetime – it was known that the colours might well fade or the pigment break up. His biographer Joseph Farington wrote that each picture “was an experiment in some project of improvement suggested by his incessant endeavours to reach something unattained either by himself or others”. But others were not always intended to benefit the most, because was also a notoriously secretive man, using his own shorthand for notes and keeping his chemical ploys to himself to the frustration of conservators ever since.
When an Oxfordshire landowner, Oldfield Bowles, was deciding whether Reynolds or George Romney should be commissioned to paint his daughter he was warned against Reynolds’s use of pigments that tended to fade, but plumped for him when the collector (and inspiration of the National Gallery) George Beaumont told him that “even a faded picture from Reynolds will be the finest thing you have”. The result was Miss Jane Bowles of about 1770.
These days the Wallace Collection is known more for its rococo and French Romantic painters, its Bouchers, its Fragonards, its Greuzes. But the head of the Seymour-Conway family that built Hertford House which houses the museum, the first Marquess of Hertford, was a patron of Reynolds and, almost certainly on the advice of Horace Walpole, portraits of most of his family were commissioned form Reynolds. Most of these have been dispersed among the marquess’s large family, but four generations of successors bought his work, so that there are 12 in the collection now.
Through the last century conservators have steered clear of Reynolds’s pictures because of their unpredictability and without guidance because of his refusal to reveal his methods, but with support form the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre a team of conservators and researchers was got together to examine them as well as restore them as near as possible to the way Reynolds saw them. It’s been a six year odyssey.
First of all, it works. The purpose of a review is to assess the value of a curated essay of an artist’s work and of the painting. In this case, the standard of the work is not in doubt, but because of the volatility of Reynolds’s work it has never before been possible to have such a good examination of how he did it. So this small exhibition of 20 pictures curated by Lucy Davis and Mark Hallett is not merely good, it is necessary.
Some of them, like John the Baptist in the Wilderness of 1770s, are too dangerously unstable to work on more than superficially because of 19th century amateurish attempts to deal with the flaking, but the use of radiography has helped the team look at Reynolds’s technique.
Colours, for instance, have faded often because of Reynolds’s use of red lake, a powdered pigment made, the Reynolds Research Project has discovered, from a cochineal dye which it turns out, is inclined to fade when mixed with other pigments like lead white, as in the face of the Duke of Queensberry of 1759. He used different oils, walnut for the blue sky in The Strawberry Girl of after 1773 and linseed for the dark background. He would mix resin and varnish with the pigment to get a gloss.
Reynolds was a devotee of the Old Masters and collected as many as he could so that at his death in 1792 his collection was worth a fortune, and he travelled in Europe to find out more. He plumbed their wisdom and techniques, but rather than copy them he used them so that his works can be seen as both classical and innovative, because he would also experiment with his construction.
X-rays of his is own early self-portrait of around 1748 when he was 25, experimental in that he is seen looking obliquely across the painting into light, his eyes shielded by his hand, show that his playing with light and shadow didn’t come off at first and he turned the whole canvas up-side-down to start again.
And it seems that his changing of mind in mid-making was often in collaboration with his sitters. He painted many of the great beauties of the day including the ac tress and writer Mary Robinson, often called “Perdita” because of her famous portrayal in The Winter’s Tale. Robinson’s affair with a cavalry officer, Banastre Tarleton, ended with his running away from gambling debts to Europe and Robinson pursued him as far as Dover when she seems to have had some kind of stroke and possibility a miscarriage after which she said she lost her looks. This unfinished portrait, Mrs Mary Robinson of 1783-4, does not hint at a faded beauty but at a forlorn one, her face turned to the sea with a “lost profile”. The radiography shows that at first she had her chin leaning on her hand in the more traditional “penseroso” pose of longing and loss; with her arm down and resting on a balustrade we suddenly have a more self-assured woman who will overcome her great adversity.
He would change things for effects, so that for the courtesan Nelly O’Brien of 1762-3 he has lowered the top of her dress, not to give a better glimpse of her décolletage but to reflect more light up to her face.
Perhaps the most stunningly successful change of mind is in his portrait here of Mrs Abington as Miss Prue of about 1771-2. Frances Abington was a former East End maidservant who became one of Garrick’s great comic actresses, and Miss Prue is an awkward but coquettish country girl in Congreve’s play Love for Love. But instead of presenting Abington in the role complete with mobcap and unruly curls as the painting began, we see her as a fine lady of fashion, sitting unconventially backwards on a dining chair and gazing intently straight at the viewer with her laughing, lustrous grey eyes. Because this, as far as Reynolds and his sitter were concerned, was the truth.
