The Sham Dairymaid

In the park of the palace of Versaille, where all things conform to an ordered, symmetrical fantasy, there is a corner of rustic asymmetry - though no less fantastic than the rest. This pocket-handkerchief collection of buildings includes a cottage with an attached watermill (below), a barn and a dairy. It is known as Hameau de la Reine (the Queen's hamlet), and was purpose-built in the 1780's to allow Marie Antoinette to indulge her pastorale fantasies. In a time when the aloof aristocracy considered that to pretend to be a hard-working peasant was quite the most charming thing, the Queen would retire with her ladies-in-waiting to Hameau, dress themselves as dairymaids and shepherdesses, and milk cows suitably chosen for their docility using custom-made porcelain pails emblazoned with the Queen's monogram.

It was against this indulgent social backdrop that the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze formed his career. While sojourning in Italy, Greuze fell in love with a countess who was one of his pupils. But with his love apparently unrequited, he returned to Paris and instead married the daughter of a bookseller. As his willing and available model, the young Anne-Gabrielle seems to have been an artist's dream come true, for not only did she possess a face which typified the ideal beauty of the time (The White Hat, below), but by using her as his costumed subject, Greuze could exploit the prevailing aristocratic taste for portrayals of a sham and impossibly romanticised pastoral life.

It was this bookseller's daughter who inspired the two works for which the artist is now best known. The Milkmaid (below) is pure charade. The satin dress is hardly authentic farm attire, and the delicate hand which loosely holds the milk ladle clearly has seen little of hard work. The ladle, and even the pony with its wicker baskets, are no more than props in a piece of contrived theatre in which this sham dairymaid is the featured actress. But with her dairymaids-are-easy pose and her come-hither eyes, she reached an audience who themselves were indulging in the same fantasies, and so were willingly convinced.

With The Broken Pitcher (below), we see the same subterfuge at work. Anne-Gabrielle, again clothed in satin, was no more likely to have fetched water from the local fountain than she was accustomed to struggle up at four in the morning to milk the lowing herd. But with this subject there is an added frisson of eroticism in the evident (to use today's ludicrously coy term) wardrobe malfunction, and in the pitcher's symbolic suggestion of shattered virginity. This symbolism is enhanced by the position of the clutched hands, and by the blooms cradled in the folds of the dress that will not now receive the water which they need to remain fresh.

When we become aware of these included elements, the seemingly-innocent escapism of The Broken Pitcher gains a darker and more forceful dimension (the detail, below). Seen in this light, it is not so much a portrayal of beauty, as it is of beauty despoiled; not so much a picture of innocence, as of innocence lost. But whose? By all accounts, Anne-Gabrielle was anything but the demure creature that she seems from her husband's canvasses. Rather, her extra-marital sexual escapades, which she apparently took no precaution to conceal either from her husband or from society in general, seem to have driven the artist to despair. Poor Jean-Baptiste. Disillusioned with his marriage, and also with the critique which his attempts at classical subjects prompted from the then all-powerful French Art Academy. Even the small fortune which his successful works generated was squandered by the extravagant frivolities of his wife. But worse was to follow.

To play at being servants and farm labourers when the real labourers were starving was, of course, a recklessly immoral indulgence. A few short years later, the Revolution came to Marie Antoinette's make-believe farm in the palace grounds, and the queen, abandoning her porcelain milk pails and her fragile fantasies, was led away to the guillotine. Unlike the queen and many of her social standing, Greuze avoided losing his head. But he did lose everything else. At age 76 he found himself destitute, with his art being rejected as superficial, sentimental and - that most damning of French adjectives - bourgeois. Jean-Baptiste Greuze died four years later, and was buried with only two mourners in attendance.

Greuze' art went from fashionable demand to scornful rejection, both during his own lifetime and beyond. It seems that only with a certain historical distance can we now see that he in fact succeeded in capturing a specific spirit of his time. That such a spirit had drifted away from harsh social realities was nevertheless something which the artist portrayed in his canvasses, and with hindsight becomes a valid historical statement in itself. And his portrayals of his wife (detail of The White Hat, above) offer images that are at the same time both innocent and coquettish, capricious and mysterious, aloof and alluring, and ultimately enigmatic. And that is art enough.

Well, I had thought to end this particular post with the above statement, but then discovered that New York's Frick Collection has a pastel portrait (detail, above, and below) of Anne-Gabrielle which Greuze painted ten years after The White Hat. Ten years can be a long time in a marriage. A world of difference separates the Anne-Gabrielle portrayed in The White Hat from the Madame Baptiste of 1790.

By 1790 the Revolution had already begun, and the social landscape which formed the basis of Greuze' art was being swept away. But it is the domestic transformation which marks Anne-Gabrielle's expression here. The mystic porcelain beauty of ten years earlier has vanished. In her place Greuze now shows a woman of resigned and weary irony. The sad disillusionment which guided the artist's hand does not make for a comfortable viewing of this sardonic portrait, but it does demonstrate Greuze' accomplishment, both artistic and human, in capturing the painful emotions of his failed relationship. Three years after Greuze painted this bittersweet portrait, and 34 years after he and Anne-Gabrielle married, the couple were finally divorced.



Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: The White Hat, 1780
Medium: Oils
Location: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: The Milkmaid, ca. 1770
Medium: Oils
Location: The Louvre, Paris

Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: The Broken Pitcher, 1771
Medium: Oils
Location: The Louvre, Paris

Artist; Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Work: Madame Baptiste, 1790
Medium: Pastels
Location: The Frick Collection, New York

Sources:
The World's Greatest Paintings, Vol. 1, ed. by T. Leman Hare. Odhams Press, Ltd. 1936
Eccentric Spaces, by Robert Harbison. André Deutsch, Ltd. 1977 (for the material about Hameau). Additional biographical information from The Wallace Collection database.

Scan of The White Hat: Harrick. Digitally restored scans of The Milkmaid and The Broken Pitcher: Hawkwood. Madame Baptiste image: The Frick Collection.

Visitations

In the closing years of the fifteenth century the city of Florence was home to an unlikely artists' partnership. Fra Bartolomeo was, as his name suggests, a simple-living and pious Dominican monk, gentle and retiring by nature. His studio partner, on the other hand, relished his reputation as a wild and woolly party animal, as partial to the bottle - and to the Florentine ladies - as he was to the tavern which he kept that allowed him to indulge his appetite for both. His name was Mariotto Albertinelli.

The studio co-operation of this apparently mismatched pair lasted until 1498 (The Annunciation, painted by both artists in 1497, above), when the good friar retreated to a monastery to continue working in devoted seclusion, leaving his pleasure-loving partner to complete several of his unfinished studio works. Five years after this, the congregation of Saints Martino and Elizabetta approached Albertinelli with a commission. He was asked to produce a large-scale work on the theme of the Visitation (below). Scripturally, this was the occasion related in Luke's Gospel when Elizabeth, the future mother of John the Baptist, is visited by her younger cousin Mary, the mother-to-be of Jesus. The figures of the two women in Albertinelli's composition would be life-size.

Now, although his surviving works are competent enough, Albertinelli does not appear to have been a particularly inspired painter. But with his commission for the Visitation, the artist seems to have lifted himself beyond both all that he previously had produced and his own stormy temperament to create a work of deep and sublime tranquility. I'm also inclined to think that only Italian genius - and perhaps only Florentine genius at that - could have produced this particular combination of luminous colors. But why do Albertinelli's colors produce an effect of such intense harmony?

When a standard color wheel is superimposed upon the scene (above), we can see that the orange of Elizabeth's robe and her olive green dress is complementary to (that is: opposite to on the wheel) the rich blue of Mary's robe and the warm red of her dress. In color theory, secondary green is complementary to primary red, and secondary orange is complementary to primary blue. In Albertinelli's composition, these colors circle around each other in a kind of dance in the costumes of the two women. Where the colors appear in the artist's composition is as critical as the colors themselves.

The elder of the two cousins leans forward to kiss her visitor in greeting (the detail, above). This simple gesture of affection, which is the whole focus of the painting, is dramatised by the background architecture. Hardly intended as a realistic building, Albertinelli deploys his background as if it were a stage set, the single arch with its Renaissance columns echoing the altarpiece curve of the painting's shape. The artist creates a perfect symmetry: the top of the painting itself and the columned arch share the same center (below), which circle also contains the action of the two women as they lean towards each other in greeting.

Well, all of the above having been said, any amount of color theory and compositional analysis is in the end not enough to explain, not only why the painting as a whole is such an unquestioned masterpiece, nor even why it is so dramatically better than this artist's other works. How is it possible that an artist notorious for his erratic and fiery temper, his drinking, and his dedicated pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh, nevertheless produced a work of such intense sublimity? Perhaps something of the spirit of his former pious friend and studio partner remained with him. Or perhaps he had his own visitation of the spirit, inexpressible in words, but able to be glimpsed through his one supreme masterwork.



Artist: Mariotto Albertinelli
Work: The Visitation, 1503
Medium: Oils
Location: Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Sources:
The World's Greatest Paintings, Vol. 1, ed. T. Leman Hare. Odhams Press, Ltd. 1936

Scans from the Web Gallery of Art (see my sidebar links). Superimposed color wheel element by Don Jusko at colorwheel dot com. Analysis graphics by Hawkwood.

In the Land of Giants

It was the land of the Patagons. Their name appears on old maps of the region (below), and in travellers' accounts which - literally - enlarged upon the prosaic truth by giving these natives gigantic stature. And so the land which we now call Patagonia became to the sixteenth century the Land of Giants. Which, in a way, it is; although the giants are in the landscape, for the giant snow-clad peaks of the Andes mountain chain end on its southernmost shore.

My thoughts drew me to this remote region when I noticed that my *prehistory blog had attracted a visitor from Ushuaia, a settlement overlooking the Beagle Channel at the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego in Argentinian Patagonia (the map, below). I enjoy it when my blogs draw what for European me are far-flung visitors, so to have one from what is regarded as the southernmost city in the world was kind of cool.

Although my own travels in South America took me no farther south than Peru's coastal desert, the region of Patagonia is one of those names in geography that reek of travellers' tales and stunning landscapes. So when in 1979 in my local library I came across a book by the then-unknown author Bruce Chatwin whose very title promised to take me there in spirit, I borrowed it and took it home. This was the hardcover edition of In Patagonia, and I devoured it from cover to cover. The book - and Chatwin's own quest - begins with a childhood memory of his grandmother showing him a piece of preserved leathery skin which she duly explained was from a 'brontosaurus'. As Chatwin later learned, it was in fact a fragment of the preserved skin of a Megatherium (the reconstruction by Zdenek Burian, below) - an extinct elephant-sized ground sloth - from a cave in Patagonia. Haunted in later years by this memory, Chatwin sets off to find the location of the creature's former habitat.

Whether or not Chatwin finds it, and what he encounters along the way, makes for exhilarating reading, and the book was still fresh in my thoughts when I was contacted by the art director of Pan Books. He was excited about a new title that Pan planned to publish under their Picador imprint, and wanted me to produce the cover art for them. Well, you can guess the rest. My brief was to use one strongly dominant and rather unreal color for a Patagonian landscape. The view which I chose was of the spectacular *peaks in the Cerro Torre Los Glaciares National Park, and I chose a dominant green tint to suggest the effect of moonlight (below). Most of my cover art took a working week to produce, but my painting for In Patagonia was completed in just two days flat, and went like a breeze.

Unusually for Picador, the art director opted for a 'wrapround'-style format (below) for the illustration, framed by a wide margin. Generally, the shelf-life of a paperback cover is some one or two years before it is reissued with a different cover. But the cover art for In Patagonia went on to establish a personal record for me, the Picador edition going through a total of eighteen reprints with the same cover over a ten-year period, before Penguin Books took over the publishing rights and used their own photographic cover. But as things turned out, that was not quite the end of my professional involvement with the land of Patagonia.

Twelve years after this, the award-winning wildlife documentary film company Partridge Films approached me to produce painted geophysical maps and the title design (below) for their film about the wildlife of the region, Patagonia: A Land Unknown. Sitting in the Partridge Films studio hunched over their editing machine, I had my first shocking look at the sequence of film in which killer whales deliberately beach themselves to seize young seals - a sequence that later also appeared in David Attenborough's own wildlife series.

I had hopes of producing cover art for more of Bruce Chatwin's titles which Picador subsequently published. But by this time a different face was seated at the art director's desk, and it never happened. These things have so much to do with timing, and with the individual personalities involved - and with the luck which makes these disparate factors coincide.



Artist: Hawkwood
Work: In Patagonia, 1979
Medium: Acrylics
Location: Collection of the artist

Sources:
In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin. Picador edition, Pan Books Ltd. 1979
Prehistoric Animals, by J. Augusta and Z. Burian. Paul Hamlyn Ltd. 1960

*Chasing the Raptor
*These peaks were also featured to spectacular effect in Werner Herzog's 1991 film Scream of Stone.

The author Austin Whittall has his own excellent and comprehensive blog about the mysterious and mythical wildlife of Patagonia, both extinct and legendary, at: Patagonian Monsters

Through the Seventh Gate

Although astronomy can explain such phenomena as eclipses, the alignments of moons and planets still hold something mysterious: these phenomena retain the aura of mystic events. In the 11th-century, in the country that was then the land of Persia, there lived an astronomer by the name of Omar ben Ibrahim al-Khayyami, who, when he was not occupied with astronomical calculations, for his pleasure wrote a series of verses which offer universal reflections on life, on death, and on implacable fate.

Seven centuries passed. Half a world away in Victorian England, a rather indifferent writer named Edward Fitzgerald decided to compose a translated version of the ancient Persian verses. Something mysterious happened. From the alignment of minds that were the Persian astronomer and the Victorian writer emerged an extraordinary poet who resembled neither, and who - at least in English-speaking minds - eclipsed both. In the West we know those verses as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and it is Fitzgerald's translation (which is more of an interpretation) which from its first appearance in 1851 established itself as the definitive and familiar English version.

In Fitzgerald's version, Omar comes across as a cheerfully practical fellow, as fond of his wine as he is of a bit of philosophy, full of good humor in the face of an unforgiving and unrelenting fate. Perhaps inevitably, Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyám attracted the production of several lavishly illustrated editions, including one by the American artist *Elihu Vedder. In 1913 a sumptuous version illustrated by the Irish artist René Bull was published. First editions of the Fitzgerald/Bull version are now rare, but in 1973 I came across one (which, I admit, is now worth several hundred times above the modest amount that I originally paid for it) in an antiquarian dealer's in London's Kings Road.

Most of Bull's illustrations burst with decorative color, but when he came to tackle the verses dealing with human death and fate, rather than continuing in the same style, he seems to have racked things up a notch to transcend his decorative approach. Here, his images resonate with an authoritive power, his color palette is limited to muted tones (the first two, above, and below), and his pen drawings (above) become both dramatic and vivid.

Basically, Omar's simple advice as interpreted by Fitzgerald is that a simple acceptance of circumstances is very different from a passive submission to blind fate. So (says Omar) take things as they come, and live in the moment as you find it, without regret. For all moments, once past, will never return. Or, as Fitzgerald has Omar say in perhaps his most famous verse:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Below, in sequence, are the four numbered verses which accompany the first four illustrations in this post. And if any reader would like to obtain a copy of the Fitzgerald/Bull edition, it is currently available as a modestly-priced contemporary reprint.



31

Up from Earth's Centre through the *Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many Knots unravel'd by the Road;
But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.

32

There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seemed---and then no more of THEE and ME.

33

Then to the rolling Heav'n itself I cried,
Asking, "What Lamp had Destiny to guide
"Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?"
And---"A blind Understanding!" Heav'n replied.

53

With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead,
And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.


Artist: René Bull
Work: Illustrations for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1913
Medium: Watercolor and pen and ink
Location: Whereabouts of the originals are untraced. Most are presumably in private collections.

Sources:
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Rendered into English Verse by Edward Fitzgerald, Illustrated in Colour and in Line by René Bull. Hodder and Stoughton, 1913 (first edition)
The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald, appearing in Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, by Jorge Luis Borges. Translated by Ruth L.C. Simms. University of Texas Press, 1964

*See my November 2009 post, The Lair of the Sea Serpent, for more of Vedder's work
*In the ancient world, Saturn was regarded as the seventh planet

The Grail, or Something Like It

In his book about the *Grail, John Matthews makes the point that the quest for the Grail is never truly over. I would add that the reason for this is not so much that the Grail will never be found, but that what the Grail actually is, and what it represents, is different for those who quest after it. Sometimes we find what we are looking for, and sometimes we don't. And sometimes what we find is not that which we originally had sought.

Whatever it is that you seek, I hope that you may find it - or something very like it - in the year to come. And even if you do not do so, then I hope that your journey is still an interesting one.

A prosperous and rewarding 2010 to my followers, to my readers, and to all fellow bloggers!



Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Quest, 1989 (digital version: December, 2009)
Medium: Acrylic, with digital elements
Location: Private collection

Source: *The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, by John Matthews. Thames and Hudson, 1981

A Winter Silence

Exactly one hundred years ago the Dutch biscuit company Verkade released with their products a series of collectors' cards. The cards were from paintings commissioned from the artists Jan van Oort and Jan Voerman, and it became an engaging passtime for many households at that time to paste the cards into the albums, descriptively written in period Dutch by Jac P. Thijsse, which Verkade issued for the purpose.

Many of the albums were themed around the nature and wildlife of The Netherlands, and the paintings, and the albums with their cards, passed into Dutch folk art and became collectors' items - so much so that various facsimile editions were subsequently issued. The most recent reissue depicting the four seasons (which are the four albums which I have) even included a set of cards to cut out and paste á la the style of the originals.

Well, I have to admit that, several years later, I still haven't gotten around to pasting in the cards (give me a break; there are one hundred and forty four in each complete set). Maybe it's something to do with the times. Not that I'm impatient, because I can cheerfully muster the wherewithall to labor for hours customising HTML codes. But there might be another reason.

Because truth to tell, it is not so much the more well-known paintings on the cards that have my attention, as it is the pen drawings which decorate the albums. So I guess that (perhaps rather ungraciously in the eyes of Dutch folk culture!) the cards are for me rather redundant, as I apparently find that the albums with their black-and-white illustrations are already satisfying-enough in themselves. A modest credit on the albums' title pages mentions that these are by 'L.W.R. Wenckebach'.

Wenckebach's illustrations hold up throughout the series, but it is those which appear in the Winter album that truly shine (the six images shown here). With remarkable economy of line, snow-covered fields, canals and Dutch farm houses are conjoured from Wenckebach's pen lines, their darkness made more stark by the areas of paper which have simply been left blank to convey the covering blanket of whiteness.

Pollarded willows so typical of the Dutch landscape bend over a frozen canal. A woman carrying pails (presumably of animal feed) makes her way over the snow to a farm house door. Boats frozen fast into the ice lie immobile by a snowy bank. On the edge of a village a bridge spans the snow-covered ice of a river. The atmosphere of crisp winter silence is tangible.

As it happens, outside my window the snow does indeed lie thick on the ground at the moment, and despite a couple of attempts at a thaw, remains much as it fell several days ago. A perfect opportunity for contemplating these superb line drawings by L.W.R. Wenckebach, and for bringing them to an audience as international as they deserve.



Artist: Ludwig Willem Reymert Wenckebach
Works: Illustrations for the album 'Winter', 1909
Medium: Pen and ink
Location: Untraced

Source:
'Winter', by Jac P. Thijsse, published originally by Bakkerij 'De Ruijter', Firma Verkade & Co., 1909. Facsimile edition issued in 1997.

The Sheltering Snow

At the beginning of the fourth century, in the city of Mérida, a young Spanish girl was martyred. During these early centuries of the new Christian faith, and the perceived threat which it presented to Imperial Rome and the established order, instances of - and opportunities for - dying for that faith were frequent enough. What perhaps is remarkable in the case of Eulalia is that, even at such a tender age (she was no more than twelve or fourteen at the time) she appararently actively sought her own martyrdom.

Knowing her daughter's declared willingness to make this supreme sacrifice, her mother attempted to hold Eulalia within the confines of her home. But her daughter escaped, found her way to the occupying Roman magistrate, and announced that she refused to sacrifice to the Roman deities. The instruments of torture were laid before her, and it was explained to her that all that she needed to do to avoid their use was to make a simple offering of a little salt and incense, which were then provided for her for that purpose. Eulalia remained resolute. The inevitable sentence was summarily executed. She was stripped. Her flesh was torn from her body with iron hooks, exposing bone. She was then staked, and burning torches were passed over her ragged flesh. Death finally came through suffocation from the inhaled smoke.

Legend steps in to elaborate upon history. At the moment of her death, a white dove appeared to issue from her mouth and ascend to heaven. When her mutilated body was cut down and laid upon the ground, a deep snow suddenly fell to clothe the broken and naked young corpse with a covering shroud of purest white. Redemption can take many forms. For Eulalia, it came in the form of the gently-falling snow so unexpected that the hardened soldiery, standing in the flakes of drifting white, were stunned to awed silence. Future canonization duly followed.


This is the story which the painting by Victorian artist John William Waterhouse (above) purports to portray. But if legend can elaborate upon history, then art, apparently, can elaborate upon both. The version of events as portrayed by Waterhouse would seem both accomplished and disturbing. Accomplished, because the artist has opted for a composition as dramatic as it is difficult to bring off, with its acute foreshortening of the principal figure of Eulalia, and its restrained and atmospheric palette of muted earth reds and cold grays. Of course Waterhouse was both an accomplished draughtsman and storyteller - as his hugely-popular Lady of Shalott, painted three years after his St Eulalia, testifies. But his treatment of Eulalia's martyrdom contains disquieting undercurrents.


The artist's model who posed for the young saint was clearly no girl at the threshold of her teen years, but a mature young woman (the inverted detail, above). And the powdery layer of snow - surely one of the central elements of the story - does anything but discreetly cover the lifeless half-nude body. Not even the most inoffensive suggestion of mortified flesh is apparent. Instead, the artist has opted for a symbolic flowering of spreading hair; an element that was already being considered in his preparatory sketch (below). That Eulalia had lustrous long tresses is known. But what is also known is that these were burned away by the torches. In these details - or rather, in the lack of them - Waterhouse presents us with a version of history which strays beyond being merely idealized to being actually sanitized. But for whose protection? For the artist's? For the sensibilities of his viewing public?


History already offered the artist the solution to this visual dilemma: the grievously mangled body of Eulalia was covered by the sheltering snow. And not the light dusting which Waterhouse shows, but a drift deep enough to make the body discernible only by its general outline. But it would seem that in his choice of a mature model, and in leaving that model unblemished and literally exposed, Waterhouse succumbed to the temptation to portray a whiff of mild Victorian *eroticism whose dubious inclusion was a betrayal of the very subject which he had chosen to portray.


Waterhouse was a master of such subtly suggestive treatments, and the studied slipped-off-the-shoulder costumes of such subjects as Psyche (the detail, above) must have had the thoughts of his Victorian audience racing with adventurous possibilities. But when he came to paint such a sensitive subject as Eulalia's martyrdom, was there not some small voice which said to him that such a voyeuristic treatment, however mild, was not merely inappropriate, but a really bad idea? Apparently not.

And the historical Eulalia? The passionate and intense sincerity of the young can burn more fiercely even than that of maturity. But is this enough to explain the young girl's fervor for, and active seeking out of, such a gruesome and horrifying death? And the Roman authorities and those who carried out their directives? Clearly such monstrous inhumanity is inexcusible in the name of any faith. But history sometimes becomes a mirror, inverting previous events. Almost exactly a century later, the horror which Eulalia suffered was again exemplified by the bestially cruel death - in a church at the hands of Christian monks - of Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the most enlightened and progressive pagan minds of her age. Eulalia had hardly begun her teen years when she died. Hypatia was forty five. Perhaps such terrible acts owe less to any perceived threats to a faith than they do to a dark and frenzied *misogyny.

Today, December 10, is Saint Eulalia's day.



Artist: John William Waterhouse
Work: Saint Eulalia, 1885
Medium: Oils
Location: The Tate Gallery, London

Artist: John William Waterhouse
Work: Study for Saint Eulalia c1885
Medium: Pen and ink with grey and brown wash heightened with white on paper
Location: The Tate Gallery, London

*This theme is also discussed in my post of November 2: 'Five Women and Four Serpents'.
*A hatred and loathing of women.

The Phantom of the Opera

This is the story of one of my pieces of cover art, and how it came into being. It is August, 1993. I receive a phone call from the art director at Puffin Books, who explains that Puffin are planning a major re-issue of their series of literary classics, and would I be interested in producing the cover art for Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (*below) for them? Within a few days I receive contracts to paint the Phantom and *three other Gothic classics for Puffin: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Terror, together with some color mock-ups from the art department of the cover designs for the new Puffin Classics series as a whole, which indicate where the title panel will be placed.

These Gothic titles are now out of copyright, which means that there are plenty of editions issued by other publishers to vie for attention in the bookshops with what Puffin will be offering. For me this is an agreeable situation, because if there are half a dozen different editions of the same book from which a potential purchaser can choose, then generally it's all down to the cover to help sway the choice that is made. At this stage I myself have no clear idea of how I am going to approach the illustration for the Phantom, other than to be guided by Puffin's request that I feature the respective 'monster' of each Gothic on the cover.

I sift for some vision of how the Phantom – Erik in Leroux’s story – might look. The American edition which I have to hand shows only the eerily-deserted grand staircase of the Paris Opera House on the cover. It's a professionally accomplished illustration, but there's not a phantom in sight - imagined or otherwise. And the films? The 1925 silent version with Lon Chaney, Snr., once seen, remains indelibly in the mind, resonating with the authentic power of a dream, or of a nightmare. Subsequent versions tend to offer a suave and rather romantic Erik who remains discreetly masked. I make a decision to ignore all previous interpretations and go back to Leroux's original text.

The airy baroque interiors of the Paris Opera House are transformed under Leroux's pen into spaces which become dark, brooding, and strangely claustrophobic in their vastness (above, and below). Leroux's opera house is at the same time both the same as, yet different from, the opera house of reality. It is a world closed in upon itself, and it is only in the air of this other opera house that Erik can breathe and live out the events of his tragic life. When one begins to read the book, one begins to breathe the same air as Erik, and his presence - even on the many pages in which he does not directly appear - is tangible. I scan the pages for a description of Erik's appearance: the cadaverous face, the yellowed skin stretched taught over the bone, the lack of a nose, the inexplicable glowing lights in the dark recesses of the eyes. As with a reading of Frankenstein, one becomes so familiar with the subsequent interpretations of others that the author's own description of the character comes almost as a shock.

I make some tentative sketches in pencil. The face described by Leroux seems so genuinely appalling that I find myself drifting towards a masked portrayal after all. I look through some pictures of stylish Venetian carnival masks. But Erik's mask is of black cloth. Not much help. Perhaps I can solve the problem by showing Erik unmasked, but keeping him as a dark figure in a corridor of shadows. I make another sketch. The result looks melodramatic - the very thing I'm trying to avoid. I decide to abandon the idea of attempting to show any atmospheric background, and zoom in on the face alone until it fills the entire cover area (my pencil sketch, below). It's only a rough sketch, but immediately I have the feeling that Erik is staring back at me. I work some more detail into the sketch and fax a copy to the art director. He offers enthusiastic encouragement for the idea.

Now begins the tracking down of reference material that might help me with the actual painting. Pictures of the Egyptian mummies in the Leiden Museum of Antiquities, and a photo of the naturally-mummified body of a priest in the Colombian Gold Museum, all become grist to the creative mill. I coat the face of my obliging son with a flour-and-water paste, then crackle-dry the resulting goo with my wife's hair dryer, studying the effect. On a canvas board I have previously applied a coating of ivory-colored oil paint with a palette knife. This ensures that the texture of the canvas will not appear too pronounced in the final reproduction, and provides me with a suitable ground on which to begin the painting. The board is about three times larger than the printed cover will be, as I know from experience that my work tends to look best in print when reduced by this ratio. But this will make the face which I am about to paint considerably larger than life-size, and my planned in-your-face approach to the Phantom becomes a shade more daunting.

I begin painting the main areas of tone with a monochromatic earth-brown oil color, and progress to the point where I must break in order to allow this first stage to dry. I prop the board against a chair in a corner of my studio. At this stage it resembles an old daguerreotype, and l'm tempted to leave the final painting with something of this look to it. As a rule, my cover paintings tend to be strongly color-themed, as this greatly enhances the impact of the printed image when it appears in the bookshop, and this seems to hold particularly true for the Gothics. There is a good reason why the original silent film version (above) of Leroux's tale packs a greater punch than any later Technicolor version. I'm now left with time on my hands as I wait for this first stage to dry. On an impulse, and to make economic use of my own time, I begin painting *Frankenstein (below). From where I'm sitting I can see the first painting, and as Mary Shelley's tragic creature takes shape in front of me, Erik continues to watch me from the corner.

And so it continues, as these two feared and tragic beings gradually assume their finished form. The atmosphere in my work area becomes noticeably more oppressive. I begin to suffer from headaches, and my wife complains - with justification - of my own increasingly morose behavior. My studio becomes a no-go area for my impressionable seven year-old daughter, and I myself start to question my own wisdom in involving myself so closely with such material. Normally I prefer not to paint at night, as artificial light distorts the accuracy of colors. But now I find myself drawn to my studio over several successive evenings, working by the hard-edged light of a halogen lamp, manipulating the brush to create the blotched and mottled texture of Erik's skin. I actually enjoy the surrounding shadows. In the yellow-white halogen light I experimentally exhale smoke from my pipe onto the painting, wreathing the Phantom in a drifting cloud. The effect is wonderful, and I try to translate it into paint, making the shadow areas which surround the face less dense, until the darkest areas of the painting are the eyes themselves: twin ovals of unknowable space, in each of which a distant sun is burning, exactly as described by Leroux. The last touch is to surround these two suns with a red coronal glow, and the painting is complete.

Fifteen years later I returned to the painting to rework it digitally (above) for a more current portfolio of my work, adding some faded blooms and a page from the score of La Traviata. Perhaps it is an unexpected point to make, but during the creation of the original painting, as with the other Gothics, I did not intentionally set out to try and be scary. Rather, I attempted to approach these images as straight portraits, striving to keep the expressions relatively neutral. I think that readers always feel when someone is actually trying to make them scared, and the natural reaction to this tends to lead to the opposite effect. Those who have seen my 'portrait' of Erik tend to comment on a certain inexplicable gentleness in the face. It is this sensitivity of spirit, trapped as it was within a nature coupled with explosions of cruel frenzy and the despair of unappeasable loneliness, which to me represents the true horror of the Phantom.



Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Phantom of the Opera, 1993
Medium: Oils
Location: Collection of the artist

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: Frankenstein, 1993
Medium: Oils
Location: Collection of the artist

Artist: Hawkwood
Work: The Phantom of the Opera, 2008
Medium: Scanned painted, photographic and textual elements
Location: Cyberspace

Sources:
'The Phantom of the Opera', by Gaston Leroux. Puffin Classics edition, 1994
'Frankenstein', by Mary Shelley. Puffin Classics edition, 1994

This post has been partially rewritten from my article which originally appeared in the Spring, 1995 edition of the Phantom fanzine BENEATH THE MASK. My appreciative thanks go to the founder of the British-based Phantom Appreciation Society for contacting me via the publisher to communicate her glowing response to my cover art on behalf of the Society. "All of us.."(her letter to me ended) "..have our own visions of how Erik must have looked - you have captured that vision for us." Feedback from the reading public is one thing, but to have received this reaction from such a critical audience is praise much-valued!

*My cover for this edition of the Phantom is generally available to see on the Internet, although these other versions - and the printed cover itself - tend to give my original colors a strong orange cast. For my image for this post, I have matched the colors to my original painting.

*I subsequently received commissions to produce cover art for three further Gothic titles: Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But by this time, further editorial hands were involved, and it is the Phantom, and the covers for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe's Tales, which remain my own favorites, being the three titles to reach the bookshops virtually intact from my original planned sketches.

*See my post of September 13: ‘Monsters Have Light Inside’.