Thomas Hennell

 

I found this image on a picture-sharing platform this morning, and liked it on sight for its light touch and lively, easy style. It's a watercolour of 'Hampden Row' (Hampton Row in Bath?) by Thomas Hennell, a name that meant almost nothing to me. An artist, illustrator and writer with a particular interest in rural subjects, Hennell was born in Kent in 1903, and his career was interrupted by a schizophrenic breakdown that led to his spending more than three years in mental hospitals. When he returned to his life's work in 1935, he collaborated frequently with the prolific ruralist writer H.J. Massingham, and was encouraged by Edward Bawden (whom he had met, along with Eric Ravilious, in 1931) to write an account of his mental illness, The Witnesses. In 1936 a volume of Hennell's poems was published, with wood engravings by Ravilious. 
  Hennell's life, like so many others, changed dramatically with the coming of war in 1939. He immediately offered his services to the War Artists' Advisory Committee (headed by Kenneth Clark), who initially commissioned him to paint records of farming life, but in 1943 he became a salaried official war artist – and was sent to Iceland to replace Eric Ravilious, missing presumed dead after his plane had come down at sea while searching for a missing aircraft.  Hennell painted for some months in Iceland before returning to England. After that, he seems to have spent most of his time on the move, still working as a war artist, recording preparations for D-Day, following the First Canadian Army through northern France, then joining a Royal Navy unit to record the advance into Belgium and Holland. After this he worked for the Air Ministry in the Far East, painting in Burma, travelling across India to Colombo, then to Penang and Singapore. His final assignment was in Java, where he was captured by Indonesian nationalist fighters in November 1945 and never seen again. Born in the same year as Ravilious, he lived only three years longer. Two sad losses for English art. 
  Rather surprisingly, Hennell doesn't feature in Christopher Neve's classic Unquiet Landscape. There is, however, an excellent website devoted to him and his work, which is well worth a look... 

(Re)moving Pictures

This is a curious story. It seems that our new Prime Minister, Free-Gear Keir, has removed historic portraits of Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Ralegh from a reception room in 10 Downing Street, replacing them with two studies by Paula Rego inspired by the predella of Carlo Crivelli's Madonna della Rondine altarpiece (that's the predella above).  Personally, I would find anything by Paula Rego harder to live with than Walt and Liz, but Starmer doesn't seem to have a problem: his difficulty, he has said, is with pictures looking at him. 'I don't like images and pictures of people staring down on me. I've found it all my life' (his only reason, he says, for removing portraits of Gladstone and Lady Thatcher from Downing Street). If this is true, it is almost interesting. So too is something Douglas Murray mentions in his latest Spectator piece, aptly titled 'Does Keir Starmer have a soul?': 'When asked what his favourite novel was before the election, Starmer said he doesn't have one. A favourite poem? Doesn't have one. To cap the anti-aspirational tenor of the times, he was asked about dreaming and he said he doesn't have a dream.'  So, this much, if true, we know about this strange man: he doesn't like pictures looking at him, doesn't have a dream, and probably doesn't read (in any real sense). Hmm. 
  To make things stranger still, a Downing Street spokesman has declared that the Paula Rego replacement scenario had nothing to do with the present incumbent anyway, but was part of a planned reshuffle of the government art collection. So maybe there's no story here at all. Ah well...

 

'Far known to sea and shore...'

Time for a poem, and as I'm not long back from Venice, here's one on a Venetian theme – one of A.E. Housman's less well known works, published after his death (in the collection More Poems), probably because it is a little too revealing of Housman's sexual predilections. In Venice he had had a romantic liaison (inevitably abortive) with a gondolier called Andrea, who is named in the poem, but the dominant presence, and absence, is the campanile in St Mark's square. On the morning of Monday, 14 July, 1902, the massive bell tower had collapsed vertically onto itself, leaving nothing but a huge pile of rubble and one dead cat, the custodian's. Fortunately the square had been evacuated just in time, so there were no human casualties. It was rebuilt – dov' era e com' era (where it was and as it was), as is the Venetian way – by 1912. Anyway, here is the poem...

Far known to sea and shore,

        Four square and founded well,

A thousand years it bore,

        And then the belfry fell.

The steersman of Triest

        Looked where his mark should be,

But empty was the west

        And Venice under sea.

From dusty wreck dispersed

        Its stature mounts amain;

On surer foot than first

        The belfry stands again.

At to-fall of the day

        Again its curfew tolls

And burdens far away

        The green and sanguine shoals.

It looks to north and south,

        It looks to east and west;

It guides to Lido mouth

        The steersman of Triest.

Andrea, fare you well;

        Venice, farewell to thee.

The tower that stood and fell

        Is not rebuilt in me.

Mother and Son

 Succumbing to my Ivy Compton-Burnett addiction again, and happening upon a title I had not yet read, I plunged into Mother and Son (1955), a late, immensely enjoyable, very funny and indeed almost mellow work (which deservedly won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). 
Mother and Son is a quite straightforward affair, driven by the interactions between two households – one of spinsters and a cat (of whom more later), the other a familiar Compton-Burnett set-up: tyrannical elderly head of household (female), somewhat ineffective partner (her husband), somewhat ludicrous middle-aged son, and two young nephews and a niece who act as a sharply perceptive, truth-telling chorus. The action begins with the tyrannical Miranda Hume interviewing a potential 'companion', who retires hurt after a bruising interrogation, taking up a comparable position in the nearby household of spinsters, the younger of whom, Hester, who is something of a free spirit, duly heads for the Hume household to make herself useful there. As usual in the fictional world of Ivy Compton-Burnett, there are startling revelations – a little cluster bomb of them in this case – which turn everything upside down. As a result, rash courses of action are embarked on, but this time they are soon abandoned, and everything returns to something like normal (with the difference that everyone now knows who they are, which they didn't before). 
  The most strongly drawn character is the middle-aged, mother-devoted son, Rosebery (known to the children as 'Rosebud'). Hilary Spurling, Ivy's great biographer, describes him perfectly as 'almost an honorary woman: a repressed and virginal elderly queen whose virtually complete lack of self-knowledge enables him to make wildly indiscriminate advances to wildly unsuitable partners in a state of semi-permanent sexual agitation'. The other strongest character is not human, but a cat called Perseus, the object of the spinsters' devotion. He is, in their eyes, a creature of more than human insight and wisdom, but to anyone else Perseus is all cat. Here he is in action, after Hester fears she has upset his tender sensibilities: 
'"Poor Plautus, has he gone away to cry by himself? I must go and comfort him."
She went out with this purpose, but found it was not Plautus who needed comfort. He was sitting on the grass behind the house, with an air of doing something deeply congenial, his eyes on some birds, who were fluttering and crying under his openly sinister scrutiny. It was true that he knew things that they did not, and he was engaged with them at the moment.' 

 

So...

 A few last thoughts on Venice, and then (promise) I'll move on.
Was it better or worse than six years ago, when it left me wondering whether I'd ever visit La Serenissima again? On the whole, I think, a good deal better, probably in large part because those gigantic floating hotels that pass themselves off as 'cruise ships' are no longer allowed to dock in the city to debouch their cargoes of tourists. The usual overpopular areas, particularly around San Marco and the Rialto, were crowded, of course, but less so than on my last visit, and the composition of the tourist throng was different: perhaps because we came this time in October rather than September, the majority of the tourists were Italian. This was gratifying – after all, it is part of their patrimony – as was the fact that in many parts of the city the Venetian residents seemed more in evidence than before. Perhaps this was the October effect again, but there was certainly ample proof that Venice is not a tourist theme park in which only tiny numbers of locals still live – and the presence of so many families with children surely shows some faith in a Venetian future.  
  As ever, much was 'in restauro' (including the Salute itself), but this is surely a sign of life and of care for the city's unique heritage, and the work is much needed. It will never be done, but a grand project to clean and restore every major painting in every church in Venice would be a wonderful thing, quite transforming the look of the painted city and bringing many great images back to life. But the work goes on, and in the half century or more in which I've been visiting Venice, great things have been done. 
  Something that has got noticeably worse is the graffiti, of which there is more than ever before, much of it ugly and intrusive. Ruskin would be appalled – but then that is true of so much about modern Venice, and indeed the modern world. Perhaps best to leave Ruskin out of it...
  One more positive thing: though it is always possible to spend a great deal of money in Venice, it no longer seems, for most purpose, that much more expensive than England. Perhaps it's just that we have caught up. 

Ghetto

 Yesterday we visited the Venice ghetto (the first in the world, more than 500 years old, and in its day one of the best places in Europe for Jews to settle). We found it a thriving and cheerful place, with a warm, relaxed atmosphere, full of families enjoying the sun after so much recent rain – all very much more lively than I remember it from earlier visits. There were carabinieri and other security personnel dotted about, but no tension in the air. All felt good.
  Today is the anniversary of the horrific pogrom in which Hamas and their civilian foot-soldiers gave the clearest possible demonstration of their genocidal intent toward the Jews of Israel. And now, one year on, the Israelis stand accused of genocide, huge demonstrations in apparently civilised cities call for the destruction of Israel, and the walls of Venice are liberally adorned with 'Free Palestine' graffiti and worse. The world has truly gone mad. 

'At the top-top-top-of everything'

 Yesterday was a day of incessant heavy rain and blustery wind, but at least we made it to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a visit to which remains one of the greatest experiences even Venice has to offer. It was here that the discovery of the power of Tintoretto's art inspired Ruskin to write The Stones of Venice:
'Tintoret swept me in away into the mare maggiore of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of Venice herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue.'
His encounter with the paintings in the Scuola exploded Ruskin's former neat classification of the great artists. As he reported at the time,  'I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today – before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters and put him in the school of Art at the top-top-top-of everything, with a big black line underneath.'
Unfortunately the Crucifixion, for Ruskin and many others the greatest painting in the world, is currently in restauro, concealed behind a high screen while the conservationists and restorers get to work. The results promise to be spectacular – another good reason to revisit Venice. 
And this morning it is still raining, though mercifully with less force than yesterday.