Marianne North: 'A very wild bird'

Born on this day in 1830 was the brilliant flower painter and tireless traveller Marianne North, who, even by the standards of intrepid, globetrotting Victorian spinsters, was pretty extraordinary. In an age before jet travel and motorways (or indeed motor transport), she travelled and lived in Jamaica, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Tenerife, Japan, Ceylon, India, Borneo, Java, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Seychelles and Chile - all in the space of a decade and a half. And wherever she went, she painted her astonishing, botanically accurate, vividly coloured oil paintings of the exotic plant life she found. What's more, she painted these plants not as specimens in isolation but as organisms in an ecosystem, creating pictures that are beautifully composed and richly detailed as well as precisely descriptive.
  Born into a wealthy and well connected family, Marianne shared her father's passion for travel and botany and, when she found herself alone and free following his death (in 1869), she decided to indulge them both, along with her new-found love of oil painting - which she described as 'a vice like dram-drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one'. She abhorred marriage - 'a terrible experiment', in her view, that turned women into 'a sort of upper servant' - and disliked company, so most of the time she lived, travelled and painted alone. 'I am a very wild bird,' she declared, 'and like liberty.'
  She became a reluctant celebrity in her own lifetime and the crowds flocked to an exhibition of her work in London in 1879 - a success from which she shrank, but which gave her an idea:  to give all her paintings as a gift to the Royal Botanical Society at Kew, and to build a gallery at her own expense to display them to the public. The gift was rather reluctantly accepted, and the gallery - a temple-like building in a corner of the Gardens - is still there. It was recently restored, and is quite unlike anything of its kind - indeed Kew claims it is the only gallery devoted to a single female artist, with full public access, anywhere in the UK.
 The effect of Miss North's paintings en masse is somewhat concussing - those colours! Her palette was certainly well adapted to the tropics. But then, if she hadn't painted in vivid oils, but in the more usual delicate watercolours, little or nothing of her work would have survived. You can view the gallery online here...

Zane

My deathday post for (Pearl) Zane Grey is on the Dabbler today...

Horrors

In yesterday's Dabbler, Brit was recalling the grim experience of walking through the first 20th Century British gallery in the Tate. I too was making my flinching, wincing way through that gallery on Sunday, immediately after enjoying the little connecting room that contains Georgiana's Dead Bird - not to mention a fine Ruskin drawing of a corner of the facade of San Marco, and Arthur Melville's stunning The Blue Night, Venice.
What is it with British art of the past century or so that it is so fixated with the grotesque, the repulsive, the ugly and horrific? Surely no other culture has ever put such high value (and sky-high prices) on art that no sane person could bear to live with - fancy a Bacon on the wall, anyone? A Lucian Freud nude? How about some nice Chapman Brothers mutilations or Gilbert and George coprophilia? Call me old-fashioned and simplistic, but surely art should be (or attempt to be) beautiful and give pleasure. But maybe this kind of grotesquerie does give pleasure of a sort - something akin to what the French call nostalgie de la boue, a yearning for degradation. There is a very strong strain in our culture that regards the ugly and brutal as essentially more 'authentic' than the beautiful and pleasing - despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that most of us live lives of such comfort, peace and ease as past generations could only dream of. It's akin to the curious predilection for violence, dark secrets, corruption and conspiracies in TV drama (British and Scandinavian - i.e. the least violent and corrupt societies on Earth, more or less). This is the spurious glamour and cost-free thrill of  'authenticity', a kind of inverse sentimentality. In the world of the visual arts, our preoccupation with the dark side might come to seem as baffling to future generations as the overt sentimentality of the Victorians, and ugliness might again be recognised for what it is. Ugly. 

Dead Bird

Mooching around in the Tate ('Tate Britain', that is) yesterday afternoon, I spotted a picture I'd never noticed before - a small, jewel-like watercolour of a Dead Bird. It's identified as the work of Georgiana MacDonald (1840-1920) and dated to 1857, so it's the work of a very young artist - one who clearly had real talent, especially with colour. Who was she? Labelling at the Tate is far too concerned with airy platitudes about periods and schools to give us such useful information, so I looked up this Georgiana MacDonald when I get home - and then the penny dropped. Far from being a talented youngster who disappeared without trace, this Georgiana was the 'Georgy' who, at the age of 19, married Edward ('Ned') Burne-Jones.
She was one of 'the MacDonald sisters', four Birmingham siblings who all made remarkable marriages - Alice marrying John Lockwood Kipling and giving birth to Rudyard, Agnes marrying the PRA Edward Poynter, Louisa marrying Alfred Baldwin and giving birth to PM-to-be Stanley, and Georgiana marrying Edward B-J, bearing him an extensive family, and enduring the public scandal of Ned's passionate affair with a Greek model (who at one point tried to drown herself in the Regent's Canal).
With all that to cope with, Georgiana - who had shown such early promise, and in her teens had mingled on equal terms with the Pre-Raphaelites and the William Morris circle - was obliged to give up her own artistic endeavours and devote herself to caring for the growing family. Looking back years later, she wrote, poignantly and honestly: 'I remember the feeling of exile with which I now heard through [the studio's] closed door the well-known voices of friends, together with Edward's familiar laugh, while I sat with my little son on my knee and dropped selfish tears on him as "separator of companions and the terminator of delights".' In terms of her artistic career, then, Georgiana was pretty much a talented youngster who disappeared without trace - but at least there's that enamel-bright Dead Bird hanging in the Tate.

A Good Egg: Thomas Love Peacock

The list of classic writers who seem to have been thoroughly decent good people, and who we sense would be enjoyable company, is not long. Keats and Chekhov for sure, Charles Lamb, probably Jane Austen... One who can be added to the list was born on this day in 1785 - Thomas Love Peacock.
  Peacock - friend of Shelley (and defender of his maligned first wife) and, for a while, father-in-law of George Meredith - worked, like Lamb, for the East India Company. He outlined a day's work there thus:

From ten to eleven, have breakfast for seven;
From eleven to noon, think you've come too soon;
From twelve to one, think what's to be done;
From one to two, find nothing to do;
From two to three, think it will be
A very great bore to stay till four.

But in fact Peacock worked hard and well, succeeding James Mill as Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence (and being succeeded by John Stuart Mill). He appeared often before parliamentary committees, and is even credited with designing the first armoured steamboats used by the Royal Navy.
  His novels - from Headlong Hall to Gryll Grange - are like nothing else in English literature. Hardly bothering with plot or character, he simply gathers together a group of people - often representative of particular ways of thinking - and lets them talk, with occasional interludes of often farcical action, and frequent songs and lyrics, mostly celebrating the pleasures of food and drink. One of his novels (Melincourt) features an orang-utan, Sir Auron Haut-Ton, who stands for Parliament; another (Nightmare Abbey) contains a humorous portrait of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry, author of Philosophical Gas; or, A Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind. Written by a less deft hand, with the satire laid on more heavily, these novels would surely have sunk without trace, but they survive and are still - once you get used to Peacock's way of doing things - great fun to read. 
  The genial comic spirit that suffuses the novels seems to have come naturally to the man. His granddaughter remembered Peacock in old age as 'ever a welcome guest, his genial manner, hearty appreciation of wit and humour in others, and the amusing way in which he told stories made him a very delightful acquaintance; he was always so agreeable and so very witty that he was called by his most intimate friends the "Laughing Philosopher", and it seems to me that the term "Epicurean Philosopher", which I have often heard applied to him, describes him accurately and briefly. In public business my grandfather was upright and honourable; but as he advanced in years his detestation of anything disagreeable made him simply avoid whatever fretted him, laughing off all sorts of ordinary calls upon his leisure time.' [A sound policy for later life.]
  He's described elsewhere as 'a rare instance of a man improved by prosperity' and 'a kind-hearted, genial, friendly man, who loved to share his enjoyment of life with all around him, and self-indulgent without being selfish.' It would surely have been pleasant indeed to know Mr Peacock.

Anthology 14

To break the 13, here is a poem - a poem called Poem - by the quietly brilliant American poet Donald Justice. It's not often you come across a poem that begins by telling you what it's not about - 'You', as it happens - that declares 'You neither can nor should understand what it means', that urges you to 'close your eyes. Yawn. It will be over soon' - a poem that is, it seems, all about what it is not about, that boasts only 'the spurious glamour of certain voids'. Only Justice, perhaps, could pull it off - a poem 'most beautiful in its erasures'. But beautiful, for all that - for all that absence - it is...


 POEM

This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.

Even while you sit there, unmovable,
You have begun to vanish. And it does not matter.
The poem will go on without you.
It has the spurious glamor of certain voids.

It is not sad, really, only empty.
Once perhaps it was sad, no one knows why.
It prefers to remember nothing.
Nostalgias were peeled from it long ago.

Your type of beauty has no place here.
Night is the sky over this poem.
It is too black for stars.
And do not look for any illumination.

You neither can nor should understand what it means.
Listen, it comes without guitar,
Neither in rags nor any purple fashion.
And there is nothing in it to comfort you.

Close your eyes, yawn. It will be over soon.
You will forget the poem, but not before
It has forgotten you. And it does not matter.
It has been most beautiful in its erasures.

O bleached mirrors! Oceans of the drowned!
Nor is one silence equal to another.
And it does not matter what you think.
This poem is not addressed to you.

Rio, Here We Come!

Good news! The heroic Roy Hodgson - cultivated polymath and Carshalton Athletic alumnus - has managed to prevent the England squad from losing any matches and last night successfully steered them through to the World Cup Finals in Brazil. Bravo Roy! This calls for a song and dance to start the day...