A Stunner in Room One

Talking of the National Gallery, one of the things I most like about that great institution is Room 1, the small room devoted to exhibitions consisting of a single painting (or sometimes a few more). It's the antithesis of the all-conquering blockbuster, offering the welcome chance to look properly, at length and with due concentration, at a painting.
  The present occupant of Room 1 is an absolute stunner. That's it above, though the reproduction gives no idea of its sheer scale (it's huge) or the brightness of its colours. It's The Repentant Magdalene by Guido Cagnacci, a northern Italian Baroque painter whose works were all but forgotten until the Sixties, and who is wholly unrepresented in UK public collections.
 Judging by this powerful masterpiece, Cagnacci is clearly a painter of rare gifts and equally rare inventiveness. Everything about this repentant Magdalene is quite unique - from the dramatic composition, with the Magdalene prostrated in the foreground and the dramatic expulsion of Vice by Virtue dominating the central space, to the palatial setting, the luxurious discarded finery, and the extraordinary grouping of the Magdalene and her virtuous sister at floor level.
  The standard repentant Magdalene is a figure of voluptuous, titillating beauty who seems unaware of her bared breasts as she turns her tear-filled eyes heavenward and clasps her hands in new-found piety. Cagnacci's Magdalene, by contrast, turns her face towards her sister, who is pointing the way to virtue - but the Magdalene's face is in shadow and looks uncertain, thoughtful, conflicted. There is not an ounce of sentimentality here.
  There is, however, all the sensuousness you'd expect of this subject - and then some. Cagnacci's handling of light falling on tender female flesh is absolutely masterly. Indeed it's his forte - half-length female nudes were his speciality, and he made a good living from private commissions. These might take their ostensible subjects from mythology, history or the Bible, but their intent and their appeal were clearly erotic.
  In The Repentant Magdalene, Cagnacci shows off his sensuous skills not only on the barely-draped body of the Magdalene but on the exposed flesh of the androgynous angel representing Virtue. And every inch of flesh gets the full, loving treatment - even the feet, which some said Cagnacci couldn't paint, such was his devotion to the half-length nude. He could.
 The Repentant Magdalene has been lent to the National by the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, and will be on show until May. Don't miss it - it's a revelation.

Floral Tour

Over on the flowerful blog of Freddie's Flowers, I take a floral tour of the National Gallery...

Loitering with Intent

Wandering into a local charity shop the other day, I couldn't help but notice a first edition of Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, in its original, rather loud dust-wrapper. It was keenly priced (£4.99) and I hadn't read it - though I'd read and enjoyed (and even reviewed, for the late lamented Listener) its literary near relation from the Eighties, A Far Cry from Kensington. So I bought Loitering with Intent, and I've read it, and I enjoyed every moment - indeed, this might even be my favourite Muriel Spark.
  Like A Far Cry from Kensington, it's a return visit to Spark's life as a struggling young would-be poet and novelist in Kensington - then a less than respectable part of London - 'in the middle of the twentieth century,' as she puts it. The story is briskly told, with never a wasted word - or emotion; the narrator has all the cool, sharp-witted detachment we expect of a Spark heroine. What unfolds is an intriguing, beautifully engineered tale, in which the narrator, Fleur Talbot, takes a job with one Sir Quentin Oliver, an almighty snob who is also, Fleur gradually realises, probably mad and almost certainly bad. He runs an outfit called the Autobiographical Association, whose members - a bunch of dim and variously needy minor eminences - he encourages to write their memoirs with 'absolute frankness'. Fleur's job, such as it is, is to knock these pathetic writings into some kind of shape.
  Fleur has been writing her first novel, Warrender Chase, and she is increasingly disturbed to find that events from her novel are playing themselves out in the eccentric world of the Autobiographical Association. And Warrender Chase is not the only book feeding into the action of Loitering with Intent: Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Cellini's Autobiography are permanent presences, and also in the picture are Fleur's new novel, All Souls' Day, and the one she plans to follow it with, The English Rose (a key phrase in Loitering with Intent). But this is most definitely not a dreary exercise in meta-fiction - in fact it's a notably jolly piece of work, with elements of farce and a whiff of Ealing comedy about it (quite fitting for the period). There's a sinister edge to it (as in many Ealing comedies), but it's most definitely a comedy, and a notably inventive, ingenious and entertaining one that kept me eagerly turning the pages - and there are only 220 of them (those were the days!). Better shaped and more ambitious than A Far Cry from Kensington, it's classic Spark. If you have a taste for her (and I know many don't) and haven't read this one - do seek it out.

From Essex to Edward Thomas's Field

I spent yesterday walking in eastern Essex, around Rochford - not quite Essex badlands but with some of the salient features: straggling bungaloid growth, big brash houses behind pseudeo-baronial gates and railings, overextended roadhouse pubs with huge car parks, the odd breaker's yard, a brackish creek with boats rotting away at the moorings... However, the area also has a curious charm - a bleak kind of charm perhaps, but charm nonetheless. Wide views and tall skies, vast fields of turned clay, beds of wind-blown rushes, flocks of swans grazing, buzzards mewing, a scattering of pleasant old buildings - Georgian brick houses, clapboard cottages - surviving among the later excrescences. And there were several good-looking, homely churches of stone and brick on our route - the grandest and most handsome of them St Andrew, Rochford, pictured above.
  En route to the start of the walk, we breakfasted at an improbably located cafe in a small off-road industrial estate. The place was called Childerditch - a name that must resonate with any Edward Thomas fan.
 In April 1916, while convalescing from an illness, Thomas wrote a set of four 'Household Poems', of which the first is addressed to his elder daughter, Bronwen.

If I should ever by chance grow rich 
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater, 
And let them all to my elder daughter. 
The rent I shall ask of her will be only 
Each year's first violets, white and lonely, 
The first primroses and orchises-- 
She must find them before I do, that is. 
But if she finds a blossom on furze 
Without rent they shall all forever be hers, 
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,-- 
I shall give them all to my elder daughter. 

The original of this sweet, musical poem, in Thomas's hand, survived among his documents - you can see it here. The Childerditch he was thinking of was a field, of course, and far from Essex.

Doris Day

With Storm Doris raging - well, blowing hard, here in the Southeast - the Met Office is taking the opportunity to tell us what a spiffing wheeze it was on their part to start giving every storm a name. You know how it works - starting each year with an A and advancing alphabetically, naming storms alternately with male and female names. This, a Met Office lady told us on the Today programme this morning, has really captured the public's imagination, raising awareness and encouraging 'engagement through social media channels' - every storm a Twitterstorm, as it were.
  Well maybe, but the storm naming business has also given the long-suffering British people yet another reason to laugh at the Met Office, especially when an ominously-named storm turns out to be no more than a puff of wind, or a storm with a totally pathetic name proves to be a real one - Doris, for heaven's sake...
  Last year's naming didn't get beyond Katie, thereby depriving us of the eagerly awaited Storm Nigel. If we get as far as K this year, we'll have Storm Kamil; a little farther and we'll get to the terrifying Storm Malcolm, or even the verbally challenging Oisin, by way of this year's N - Storm Natalie (be afraid...). If, by some meteorological fluke, we get as far as W, we'll have what must be the most pathetic storm name ever - Storm Wilbert. But now I must go out into Storm Doris - I may be some time.

Piperise Your Snaps

It's not often (actually it's never) that I get an idea for an 'app', but one came to me the other day, so I pass it on for the benefit of any hot young app designer who might be reading this, unlikely as that is. Here's the pitch...
  We've all been there. You're on a church crawl, you come across a particularly striking church  in a fine setting that will surely make a good picture. You duly photograph it, look at the resulting image, are mildly disappointed, and think 'What would John Piper have made of this scene?'
  If you're at Binham Priory, say, you can easily find out. Let's say this is your photograph -

  And here is Piper's picture of the same scene, infused with dramatic presence and a brooding sense of imminent apocalypse - or at least rain ('pretty unlucky with the weather, Mr Piper,' as George VI remarked) - by the artist's bold and well loaded brush -

 But what if you've photographed a church - or it might be a historic house or some random ruin - and there is no John Piper picture of it? Well, that's where the John Piper app comes in. With a touch of a button you can Piperise your snap and transform it into a work of art, with computer-generated pen-and-ink detailing and washes of glowing (or glowering) Pipercolour. How good would that be? I'd buy it like a shot.

The Year Begins

At last, my patience (what patience? It's only February - Ed.) has been rewarded and I've seen my first butterfly of the year. I was taking a hopeful stroll around a local nature reserve called Wilderness Island - which was indeed a tangled wilderness when I was a boy but has since been tamed and cleared sufficiently to provide a habitat for a good range of wildlife, from bats to butterflies. The sun was out, there was a vernal warmth in the air - and there, on a brisk questing flight among the trees, sulphur yellow against  holly-and-ivy green, was a Brimstone. The year's begun! Spring is round the corner, soon there will be more butterflies, more of these joyous moments. Indeed, I had seen four or five more Brimstones before I left the island, a happy, smiling aurelian. And so home.