PAINTING A THOUSAND WORDS - Autumn Leaves ( 1855-1856 )

 

John Everett Millais,at the precocious age of eleven won himself a place at the Royal Academy Art School. By the time he was twenty,in 1848, he was a founding member of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His painting Christ in the House of his Parents (1849-50) provoked accusations of blasphemy. This fueled his rise to fame, wealth, establishment respectability, a knighthood and eventual baronetcy. However, as is often the case, artistic child prodigies take their 'genius' far too much for granted

It has been frequently said of Millais's artistic career, that he squandered his talent for money and status. A view based upon subsequent work as an illustrator, the paintings executed for commercial advertising, the drained palate of his later painting used to such emotionless effect. All would indicate some truth to this opinion. The early colourful effervescence of his talent, didn't just fizzle out and die, it carried on afterwards as a deathless ghostly apparition of itself. But by the mid 1850's, when he was painting Autumn Leaves, Millais had become the leading light and acceptable face of the Pre-Raphaelites. A transgressively vivid painter of allegorical literary or biblical scenes,with often this sense for the transient,elements of mystery and complete mastery of the mournful mood. Autumn Leaves was the first in a sequence of paintings to explore that season as a metaphor for impermanence. Two other paintings in this occasional series The Vale of Rest(1858-62 ) and Chill October (1870) were to follow.

In some respects the progression of their subject matter exemplifies the slow malformation of Millais's artistic muse. The Vale of Rest appears, at first glance, to echo the sentiments of Autumn Leaves. Taking place at twilight, where two nuns are very hurriedly digging a grave before it gets too dark to see what they are doing. What was perhaps merely suggestive in Autumn Leaves, is made emphatically plain in Vale of Rest. The allegory is presented with a much heavier handed intent, earnestly reaching out to make itself known. It drives home its evidently mordant moral undertow. The seated nun on the right, looking pointedly straight out at the viewer, as if to say - remember this. As a painting this is not subtle.

By the time we reach Chill October fourteen years later, what we are presented with here is a rather bleakly plein-air painting of a Scottish loch, boggy and windy and cold hearted. No figures, allegorical or otherwise, are present, just a vague sense of an underlying mood from the earlier works resurfacing.The place is desolate, lost of any sense of direction for its soul, devoid of human context or frailty. Its not then unreasonable to question why this shift in focus happened ?

The original seven members of The Pre-Raphealite Brotherhood were an unwieldy mixture of like minded young painters and poets. For all their stated idealism, it is in the nature of such artistic movements to be internally fractious, loosely aligned and inherently fragile collectives. Holman Hunt and Millais, were the visual realists, whereas Rossetti and his artistic acolytes were the more seriously aligned medievalists. Both sides dedicated to restoring the spiritual to art. The religious controversy over Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents in 1850 proved too much for the devout Stephen Collinson, who left the group.

This was the first, but not the final straw for the Brotherhood, but that too would be supplied by Millais. John Ruskin had been the sole vocal champion of The Brotherhood, keeping them financially and artistically directed. Millais went to paint a portrait of Ruskin at his Scottish home, over the Summer of 1853. Ruskin had married Effie Grey in 1848 when she was nineteen, and he was twenty eight. Yet five years later when the handsome dashing Pre-Raphaelite Millais turns up, Ruskin had yet to consummate that marriage. Millais and Effie fast fell deeply in love and literally ran off together. The marriage to Ruskin ended up being very publicly anuled, bringing a degree of shame and disapproval into Ruskin's revered orbit. Though he continued to financially support Hunt and Rosetti, The Brotherhood was summarily ripped apart by the ensuing public scandal.

Three years later Millais married Effie, she has since been unfairly made to take the lion share of the blame for Millais’s declining artistry. Yet here he is in that very same year of his marriage painting Autumn Leaves. The two central young girls,dressed in the modest dark blue clothing of the middlingly wealthy, are Effie’s sisters, Alice and Sophie. The younger children are meant to be peasants, as they are wearing poorer styles of dress. They’re making a bonfire. All look upon the smoldering pyre of autumn leaves the girls have been gathering, collectively transfixed. The background sky has sickly sulphuric slashes of yellow and bruised purpley blue. It is twilight, the landscape shadowy, all we see are the barest of outlines.

This painting has a Chekovian air, of trapped lives with limited future prospects. The faces of the elder girls bare concerned strained faces. For some reason this bonfire building is not eliciting any childish playfulness, or sense of this being a fun thing to do. The girls look on instead rather sombre, with bowed depressed demeanours. It is as though something has died, and no one here feels willing to openly enjoy even a simple task. Whilst lost childhood innocence is a recurrent Millais theme, I’m not sure that is precisely what is being conveyed here. Its meaning feels more multi-layered than that. It is as though they’re mourning a loss, ritually burying someone or something underneath this huge pile of bronzed leaves. The tone is sorrowful, emotions just about staying contained. The littlest girl with the red bow is holding an apple, frequently interpreted as a reference to Eve and the temptation of the snake. What is the simmering symbolism of a smouldering pile of leaves? This is portraying life requiring death, as a cycle within life itself, of recurring moments of cremation. Millais understood all too clearly, what he had lost, destroyed and sacrificed to secure his love.

PAINTING A THOUSAND WORDS - Long Grass with Butterflies (1890)

Van Gogh is recovering in the psychiatric hospital in San Remy. He'd taken himself there of his own volition after a serious mental health crisis, which had resulted in the infamous incident of self harm. So far as documents tell us, he was there for around a year. But definitely left in the May of 1890 once his doctor deemed him 'cured'. Within two months of him leaving San Remy, he was dead. The result of a, possibly accidental, gun shot to his chest. Nothing in his written communications immediately prior to this, to his brother Theo, indicate that he was having suicidal thoughts. But given his history of mental instability perhaps this was just assumed.

Van Gogh before going to San Remy

It maybe Van Gogh himself spoke of it as being accidental, but no one really gave this statement that much credence. Why was he carrying a gun about his person anyway? How do you accidentally shoot oneself in the chest?.Whatever the explanation, Van Gogh lived on for two whole days after the fatal shooting, before he died. Time enough for brother Theo to hurriedly come down to see him. So surely they must have talked between themselves about the hows and whys of itl. And there are after all, Vincent’s poignant last words, as reported by his brother ‘The sadness will last forever’ Which points towards a sort of eternal fatalism existing inside of him, feeding his disturbed psyche.

Dr Paul Gachet

Long Grass with Butterflies, was painted during his stay in San Remy. Its dated 1890, so we have a clearly short time frame of a few months within which he was to paint it. Dr Paul Gachet, his doctor whilst at San Remy, was a huge art lover, and had actively encouraged Vincent to begin painting again. He saw it as a vital 'creative' remedy to passify his agitation. He painted Doctor Gachet and his daughter Marguerite. The latter, yet another example of a women with whom Van Gogh developed an unrequited dependence upon. He wasn’t so much a man unlucky in love, but a really clumsy one in romantic relations, often inappropriate or weak, with an underlying need to save supposedly ‘fallen’ women.

Marguerite Gachet

Apart from these portraits, he primarily painted views from his hospital window. Mostly looking down upon the garden and the meadows that surrounded it. It was a recurring theme in his late paintings, to find expressive force in the wilder untamed undergrowth of woods and countryside. The possible simile with his own mental state could perhaps be too easily retrospectively applied to this. However, whilst in San Remy, he was always inside, looking down upon a far less controllable existence than even his own. Engaging with such a rough cut form of nature and painting it, he might well have found this in some way consoling to his febrile nervous system and heightened sensitivity. This externalising of an internal response in oil paint, was inherently a cathartic act to him.

The painting itself, is 25 x 32 inches and perhaps easily overshadowed by its eight other companion pieces hung in The National Gallery in London. Containing the more famous cypress strewn Arle landscapes, Sunflowers and Van Gogh's Chair. Long Grass with Butterflies on a casual glance, seems a lot humbler, perhaps of less significance artistically. But as you draw your attention in, perhaps bending down to examine it in closer detail, you enter a wholly different world of insight into it, an expressive reinterpretation of what the concept of landscape could include. The surface of this literally fizzes with the electric energy contained in those inimitable brush strokes. Slashes of purple blue suddenly appear from in the midst of the coarser green blades of the long grass in the foreground. He indicates with a flock of fluid white dashes in the background, that a wind is forcing the undergrowth to undulate and flicker in the blistering sunshine.

This landscape is an uneven cleft, with a scumble of hedge and yellow gorse visible in the far distance. It is an unkempt coarse meadow, suitable only for grazing sheep on. A grey path scratching its way across the top left of the painting indicates that this was not a place to idly or romantically wander through, but to pass by quickly on your way to somewhere else. It’s not especially beautiful in any classical sense. On a practical level Van Gogh, as ever, is making the best of what he has infront of him, as he was unable to go anywhere else. Such limitations are often the prompt to greater creativity. Being forced to look more closely, Van Gogh identifies qualities in the view that he appreciates and attempts to highlight.

The primary thing to remind oneself of here, is what this painting is called - Long Grass with Butterflies. That is the dynamic Van Gogh saw most visibly at play here. The foreground of the painting is a scruffy, half dried out scrap of the meadow, where the darkest of greens fights against the encroaching parched ground. The vigorous implacable grip these grasses have upon the ground they are growing in, is dense with wide spreading roots. The blades of coarse grass are sharp edged. Hovering over these well established mounds of grass are white butterflies. They are almost too light and insubstantial, one could imagine them being blown out of existence by a strong puff of wind. They flutter and flounder and flutter, rising and falling in out of the grasses. They may only have a brief few days of life, but their efforts to propagate and feed themselves are slow but assiduous. This coexistence of the long life and rugged nature of the long grasses with the light short lived ephemerality of the butterflies, feels like this painting is a metaphor for human existence. We posit ourselves as substantial influential beings, but we come and we go, our flickering conscious awareness is soon lost, Whilst the long grass of reality carries on doggedly still harbouring new instances of life.