Dali House

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.

Evidently no one wanted this 1628 portrait of Sir Thomas Barrington when Sotheby’s tried to sell it in London in October. Maybe the auction was too close to Halloween and the figure was a little too freakish. The house was counting on somewhere around £7,000. No takers.

The painting is by “a follower of” Daniel Mytens the Elder, as the Dutchman Daniël Mijtens (1590-c 1647) was known in England, where he made his best living. Mytens did King James I and his son Charles, and in 1625 became pet painter to Charles I, then got tossed aside when Anthony Van Dyck immigrated.

Mytens sometimes stretched his subjects’ limbs too, but nothing as egregious as his follower has done here. I thought I had this phenomenon figured out: It was, of course, necessary to warp reality for such portraits because they were hung high on the palatial walls and viewed from below, so some foreshortening was essential.

But I tilted the image as though viewed from below, and of course got the opposite result. The distortion theory seems to suggest that this painting was to be viewed from above, perhaps by the angels in Heaven.

Sotheby’s identified the subject as Sir Thomas Berrington, but Wikipedia thinks the art auctioneer meant Sir Thomas Barrington, a 2nd Baronet and member of parliament who died in 1644.

Vincent has had another relapse. We wonder if his trips back to Arles cause a problem for him, or maybe he just isn’t ready to go far from the asylum. He was in Arles for a day in July to collect some of his paintings left behind and then had an attack while he was sketching in the hospital grounds and had to stay indoors for six weeks.

Then last month he came back to Arles to visit Rev Salles and Ginoux, the innkeeper, only to collapse soon after he went back to St Paul.

They told us that Vincent has tried to kill himself at the hospital by swallowing paint. They had to take all his paints away from him, so all he could do for a while was sketch.

But he’s been doing such beautiful work, especially his copies of some of the great paintings of history, by Millet, Rembrandt and Delacroix and others. He says it helps him get back on track after he’s had a seizure. He copies black-and-white prints and renders them in the colours he sees, and will adjust the composition as well.

Back in July I declared that Sotheby’s had quite a hat-trick on its hands for its London sale of Old Master Paintings, with JMW Turner’s “Virginia Water”, John Constable’s “Storm Clouds over Hampstead” and the oil above, Francisco de Goya’s “Equestrian Portrait of Don Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia”.

Turner did well, no one wanted the Constable, and the Goya sold for £2,617,250, right in the middle of the pre-sale estimate. Whoever took it home has more than a conversation piece — this painting won’t shut up.

It’s believed to be an elaborate sketch for a proper portrait that seems never to have been done, but Goya (1746-1828) certainly gives us a sturdy depiction of a sturdy nobleman on a sturdy steed. This military man, though, was more indebted to love than war.

What a character, Manuel Godoy y Alvárez de Faria! He was born poor and died poor, but in between he was the most powerful man in Spain. This came courtesy of the woman he loved, Doña María Luisa of Parma, who was the Princess of Asturias when they met but then became the wife of King Charles IV — and kept him around as her paramour.

As queen, María Luisa stepped on the gas pedal of Godoy’s career, rocketing him from a low rank in the Royal Life-Guards to Brigadier, to Field Marshal, to Duke of Alcudia and a slew of other titles, and finally to Prime Minister. From 1792 to 1808, Godoy was a third of what Queen María Luisa called “the Trinity on Earth”. Charles was nominally the head of state, but Godoy and Maria Luísa ran the country. As prime minister, he negotiated the Treaty of Basle with France, earning the title “Prince of the Peace”.

Goya’s “Queen Maria Luisa on Horseback” from 1799 is the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Below is Godoy’s eventual wife, María Teresa de Borbón y Vallabriga, later Condesa de Chinchón, who was the niece of Charles IV. The queen arranged the wedding, supposedly to get Godoy away from his latest mistress, Pepita Tudó. (He ultimately married Pepita anyway, after Maria Teresa died.) Goya, who became official court artist in 1786, painted the original Senora Godoy both before and after her marriage.

“Equestrian Portrait of Dona Maria Teresa de Vallabriga”, from 1783, is in Florence’s Galleria degli Uffizi.

Sometime between 1797 and 1800, Goya also painted Pepita, or at least many people think it’s her. Godoy certainly bought it quick. The work is called “La maja desnuda” (”The Nude Maja”) and is well known, primarily because it’s supposedly the first time a European artist clearly showed female pubic hair. My online image-storage service gets fidgety when I upload naked women, so go see the picture at the Prado or on this Wikipedia page.

The equestrian painting of her husband was done in 1794, and Goya did another, in 1801, after Godoy defeated the Portuguese in the War of the Oranges. This one called for some editorialising, Goya seems to have thought: The Duke is hardly triumphant, and perhaps the artist felt he had no cause to be jubilant, having undone the social and political progress achieved by Charles III and embraced immorality and warfare under Charles IV, jailing and exiling dissidents, including some of Goya’s friends.

“Manuel Godoy, Duke of Alcudia, ‘Prince of the Peace’” is at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid.

After 1801, Godoy climbed into bed with Napoleon and led Spain back to war with England, which ended in the naval disaster of Trafalgar, and then the virtual French occupation of many Spanish towns. Goya was there to record, in “The Third of May” and other poignant works, the bloody uprisings in Madrid. King Charles was tossed off the throne and Godoy was nabbed by a lynch mob, but the French pulled him free and took him home. He died in obscurity in Paris in 1851, and currently tries to get some rest in Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

“The Virgin and Child”, Tyrolean School, circa 1490

“The Virgin and Child”, follower of Rogier van der Weyden, circa 1450

I remember reading once that mediaeval artists never did get the hang of painting children, but I’ve forgotten their excuse.

On the casually conversational blog Scatterplot, one poster suggests that adult models were used because kids wouldn’t sit still long enough, and another that, in an epoch before the divisions in human development were recognised, babies were viewed as untamed adults.

Or is it more to do with the way Jesus was perceived? asks still another.

But there’s also a reference to Philippe Aries’ 1962 book “Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life”, in which it’s surmised that, in the Middle Ages, there was no fond reminiscence of childhood, no “loyal remembrance”, to use his term. Until the Renaissance, the infant and juvenile face and physique had no special significance.