Dali House

Images via The Nation, courtesy of the Marsi Foundation

As the gatekeeper punches the ticket of the 200,000th visitor to Dali House since June 2008, this seems an apt moment to state formally what was doubtless becoming clear enough to regulars: I’m no longer posting.

For the foreseeable future, I’m going to let Dali House rest on its laurels. What began in 2004 as a blog where I could post pictures of my own artwork and a few favourite optical illusions and Dali paintings has evolved far beyond all expectations.

Along the way my research and musings about particular artists and works of art drew an appreciative audience, and Google searches have given the site a high ranking. Too often Dali House is cited in student essays and on other websites as an authoritative source, when in fact it’s just my opinion stapled to a few facts and images I came across, sources that I too often failed to write down for scholarly posterity.

Scholarship was never my intent. Being held to it, or having it expected of you, is both daunting and humbling.

But that’s not the main reason I’m taking a break. Over-extended in cyberspace, I’m reconsidering my whole online presence (before, God help me, I get sucked into Twitter too). In the meantime I’m creating art again, of a sort — I’m experimenting with 3D digital imagery. DAZ Studio smells nothing like a canvas primed with gesso, but it’s intriguing just the same.

So, barring a corporate accident at Blogsome, this site’s host, Dali House will stand as a lighthouse abandoned but with the flame burning. I’ll endeavour to keep up with the email it generates, but if I get one more spam comment or user registration with a scam Russian address, I’ll be shutting those gates too.

In a “farewell for now” post, as a Canadian expatriate living in Thailand, I want to share some remarkable paintings by a Thai expatriate living in France.

– Paul Dorsey, aka Dorseyland, aka Administrator

These are the paintings of Her Serene Highness Princess Marsi Paribatra, most if not all of which were done at Vellara, her home in the village of Annot, which is evidently something of an artist’s colony in the foothills of the French Alps. She’s lived there since 1970, amid a menagerie of cats, dogs, chickens and other birds that feature in her work.

Thirty-eight of the paintings are on view this month in the gallery of a Bangkok mall and are next going on a bit of a tour of the country before finding a permanent place in Thailand at a new foundation being created in her name.

The exhibition at Siam Paragon is Princess Marsi’s first in Thailand in decades. Her fellow Thais have been missing out on this for a long time. I don’t know why, apart from the geographical distance.

The exceptions seem to be Marsi’s fellow Thai royalty. She has done portraits of Her Majesty the Queen and Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, wife and daughter of the current king, Rama IX. In fact the latter, her “cousin”, opened the ongoing exhibition in Bangkok. Marsi’s paintings hang in the palaces of Chitralada, Vimanmek and Bang Pa-in.

Marsi, now 79, is the daughter of MR Pantip Paribatra and His Royal Highness Prince Chumbhotbongse Paribatra of Nagor Svarga, a grandson of King Rama V, and lived most of her life abroad, first in Indonesia, then in Europe.

She was educated in Switzerland and earned PhDs in literature at the University of Paris and in art history from the University of Madrid. She knows Greek mythology and Renaissance architecture well, and it shows in her paintings, as do the influences of symbolism and surrealism — in a 1997 interview with Dichan magazine she recalled meeting Dali.

In The Nation on Sunday, Khetsirin Pholdhampalit wrote that Marsi studied the composition of Bosch, Titian, Botticello and Bellini. From Joseph Redoute she learned “botanical accuracy, right down to foreshortening the petals of a blossom”. And from Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who fashioned portraits of people from assemblages of fruit (see this post, she created a series in which flowers arranged themselves as parrots.

The intricacy of her work is startling for a schoolgirl cartoonist who didn’t take up art seriously until she was 30, and the frank subject matter is surprising for a scion of royalty. See the rest.

This is “A Young Couple in an Inn”, painted by David Teniers the Younger around 1667, but surely the viewer’s attention isn’t meant to linger long on the stud (possibly a self-portrait) who’s trying to loosen the lady’s morals under the gaze of an owl that’s no doubt wise enough to see a regrettable event in the making but too small to do anything about it.

No, much more interesting is the action in the gloom of stage right, where the innkeeper’s wife is emerging from the cellar with intent. Upload any story you like into the picture — I prefer to think she’s going to cream the old man with that plate of vittles, either for not helping with the chores or telling fibs to his buddies.

Or both.

In the interest of consoling everyone after the big festive-season get-together, here’s what happened to “the circle of” Willem Claeszoon Heda, who threw some great parties back in the 1640s.

The artist almost certainly had a more compact title in mind for this painting, but it’s ended up with a curator’s inventory instead. On sale recently for upwards of £20,000, it’s now called “A Still-life with a Pewter Wine-pot, an Overturned Nautilus Cup, a Flute-glass, a Pewter Salt, a Pie on a Dish, Olives, a Partially Peeled Lemon and a Chronometer, All Resting on a Table Partially Covered by a White Table Cloth”.

One has to wonder if the chronometer was for watching the time or timing the boat races they appear to have staged on the table.

For the record, such as it is, Willem Claeszoon Heda (c 1595-1680) was a Dutch still-life specialist who’s regarded, believe it or not, as a a neater version of the more famous Dirck Hals, his chum. He was better at arranging the tableware, evidently.

“Better” in the context of chaos theory.

Salvador Dali gives a kid an apple in Paris, December 26, 1970.

Below, “Childhood Memories of Christmas”, with a detail beneath.

In “The Company of Undertakers”, William Hogarth was just having a go, as was his wont, venting the old savage wit so he didn’t end up blowing a gasket. These gents weren’t exactly undertakers, but nearly: they were some of England’s best-known quacks.

In this age of Bernie Madoff and Climategate, I frankly don’t believe anything anymore, so it always comes as modest consolation that cynicism thrived in past epochs too. Hogarth (1697-1764) couldn’t stomach the medical shysters and here, along the top row, portrays three of the most notorious in the land.

“Chevalier” John Taylor was an oculist, so he’s wielding an eye on a bone at the top left. Next to him is Mrs Mapp with another bone — she was in the business of resetting loose and busted bones. And on the right is the pill peddler Joshua “Spot” Ward.

Spot waves a walking stick, as do the physicians clumped together below the trio, the sticks looking more like Q-Tips because they’ve all got pomanders attached to the nubs. In the days before the hot shower was invented, and long before Englishmen began taking baths every other week “whether they needed to or not”, everyone smelled awful. See the rest.